> Full security system with email notifications containing snapshots from your webcam?
I've been wanting to add this to my setup. Do you have any more details on what you have done? My main hurdles would be choosing decent cameras that can be used by Home Assistant... Cameras that don't want to phone home all the damn time.
An initial setup (on an older version of HASS) is shown here [1]. That has the basics. I've had good luck with Amcrest cameras actually, which even have a component in HASS [2]. They never phone home (check default settings though, I think they want to at first) and I access the whole thing through a OpenWRT-hosted OpenVPN server hosted on my router(s). I also really want to make sure nothing phones home ever. You can set router-level firewall rules to block WAN access if need be.
Making one with a Pi Zero W + the camera is pretty straightforward. Most of the good network cameras with simple APIs (RTSP or MJPEG) are not so trustworthy on the security side.
There's an "official" raspberry pi camera module with mature libraries already written, and I believe it comes in both a regular IR and a No-IR version for night-ish vision.
There are also a ton of different 3D-printable mounts and jigs for them on sites like thingiverse and instructables.
My favorite[1] comes as a kit with the jig, 3 servo motors, and an add-on board for a raspi. Using this I have a live-feed camera that can rotate up to 180 degress on 3 axis that I can control from anywhere in the world using my phone as long as my internet connection is up at home. All hosted locally, even the live feed frontend. It's not hard to build or set up either, took me a lazy day and I'm far from a good coder.
(i'm past the time in which I can edit my original post)
I remembered incorrectly, that PiMoroni kit does not include the 3 servo motors, you need to buy those separately along with the RPi camera module. Luckily the servos required are super common little blue servos that are all over eBay and such for dirt cheap.
OpenVPN yes. I have my router hosting the openvpn, but I think you could do that on the RPi as well. I can't say for _sure_, as I haven't tried it personally, but I think there's more than enough juice on an RPi to host all of that, especially if it's only ever going to handle 1 or 2 simultaneous connections.
I've been wanting to add this to my setup. Do you have any more details on what you have done? My main hurdles would be choosing decent cameras that can be used by Home Assistant... Cameras that don't want to phone home all the damn time.