Hey Y'all,
New user here from North Florida! I am an electrical engineer by trade and a home networking amateur by night. Up until this prior weekend, I had only employed a single Ring brand floodlight camera, which has worked well for me for about 4 years or so. Around that time, I attempted to install a Ring doorbell camera but fiddled with it for about a month before deciding I hated the way it detected, alerted, its WiFi reception, etc.
For a while, I had been wanting to move away from Ring. From the poor resolution, cloud storage, and the monthly subscription, I just didn't like it. What triggered my sudden uptick in IP cam interest was actually unrelated. My WiFi router was dying and giving poor coverage for areas of my home. A complaining wife who can't get her TikTok videos in bed was a pretty good excuse for buying networking hardware. My IT guy at work recommended that I look into some UniFi Access Points for WiFi and let my AT&T router handle the routing instead of buying a router. The WiFi AP's are PoE, and after taking about 1 hour to wire and set up 2 APs that cover my whole house perfectly, I was thoroughly impressed with UniFi to the extent that I wanted to look at what else they do. The UniFi cams caught my eye, and I started diving into PoE cameras. I then realized my existing NAS (TrueNAS) could function as an NVR. Then I realized that I could set up a VM on my NAS to run Blue Iris. Then I realized I could re-purpose my GTX 1080 GPU to utilize OpenProject AI on my NAS to do motion detection, LPR, and facial recognition. At this point, it wasn't a question of if I needed cameras or not... It was that I have the framework already in place to do it all, and do it well, so that means that I basically have to, right?
With a bunch of YouTube videos, some experimentation, and costing later, I had my hands on 1000 feet of Ethernet, 3 Reolink cameras, and 2 PoE switches. Three days later, I have a working Blue Iris AI motion detection surveillance system operating on my network server, sending push notifications to my wife and my phones with higher resolution and reliability than I expected.
Fast forward to today (Monday - 3 days into installing everything), I am moving to return the 2 Reolink 12MP RLC-1224A and replacing them with EmpireTech's IPC-T54IR-AS. The Reolink cameras basically crash my system if I try to use the full resolution in the web app live view... I also grabbed the Reolink's from YouTube recommendations. They work... but I did not have an understanding of CMOS sensor vs. MP performance. I was a simple man; I see high megapixels, I think it's good. For now, I am keeping one Reolink (the Duo3) because I like it as an overview camera for the front half of my house and the small spotlight it provides for my driveway at night.
Current Hardware (TrueNAS running a windows VM for Blue Iris)
6x HITACHI Deskstar 2TB 7200RPM (ZFS raidz1)
ASRock Micro ATX DDR3 1333 LGA 1150 Motherboards H97M PRO4
RAM: 16 GB RAM
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz (4 cores)
GPU: GTX 1080 (not installed yet)
POE Switch
Tenda TEG1109P, 8 Port Gigabit PoE
-> Services my IPCAMs and my WiFi Access points.
IPCAMs
2x Reolink RLC-1224A (replacing with IPC-T54IR-AS today)
1x Reolink Duo 3
Future Additions
Reolink doorbell cam
LPR setup w/ a IPC-B52IR-Z12E S2
New user here from North Florida! I am an electrical engineer by trade and a home networking amateur by night. Up until this prior weekend, I had only employed a single Ring brand floodlight camera, which has worked well for me for about 4 years or so. Around that time, I attempted to install a Ring doorbell camera but fiddled with it for about a month before deciding I hated the way it detected, alerted, its WiFi reception, etc.
For a while, I had been wanting to move away from Ring. From the poor resolution, cloud storage, and the monthly subscription, I just didn't like it. What triggered my sudden uptick in IP cam interest was actually unrelated. My WiFi router was dying and giving poor coverage for areas of my home. A complaining wife who can't get her TikTok videos in bed was a pretty good excuse for buying networking hardware. My IT guy at work recommended that I look into some UniFi Access Points for WiFi and let my AT&T router handle the routing instead of buying a router. The WiFi AP's are PoE, and after taking about 1 hour to wire and set up 2 APs that cover my whole house perfectly, I was thoroughly impressed with UniFi to the extent that I wanted to look at what else they do. The UniFi cams caught my eye, and I started diving into PoE cameras. I then realized my existing NAS (TrueNAS) could function as an NVR. Then I realized that I could set up a VM on my NAS to run Blue Iris. Then I realized I could re-purpose my GTX 1080 GPU to utilize OpenProject AI on my NAS to do motion detection, LPR, and facial recognition. At this point, it wasn't a question of if I needed cameras or not... It was that I have the framework already in place to do it all, and do it well, so that means that I basically have to, right?
With a bunch of YouTube videos, some experimentation, and costing later, I had my hands on 1000 feet of Ethernet, 3 Reolink cameras, and 2 PoE switches. Three days later, I have a working Blue Iris AI motion detection surveillance system operating on my network server, sending push notifications to my wife and my phones with higher resolution and reliability than I expected.
Fast forward to today (Monday - 3 days into installing everything), I am moving to return the 2 Reolink 12MP RLC-1224A and replacing them with EmpireTech's IPC-T54IR-AS. The Reolink cameras basically crash my system if I try to use the full resolution in the web app live view... I also grabbed the Reolink's from YouTube recommendations. They work... but I did not have an understanding of CMOS sensor vs. MP performance. I was a simple man; I see high megapixels, I think it's good. For now, I am keeping one Reolink (the Duo3) because I like it as an overview camera for the front half of my house and the small spotlight it provides for my driveway at night.
Current Hardware (TrueNAS running a windows VM for Blue Iris)
6x HITACHI Deskstar 2TB 7200RPM (ZFS raidz1)
ASRock Micro ATX DDR3 1333 LGA 1150 Motherboards H97M PRO4
RAM: 16 GB RAM
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz (4 cores)
GPU: GTX 1080 (not installed yet)
POE Switch
Tenda TEG1109P, 8 Port Gigabit PoE
-> Services my IPCAMs and my WiFi Access points.
IPCAMs
2x Reolink RLC-1224A (replacing with IPC-T54IR-AS today)
1x Reolink Duo 3
Future Additions
Reolink doorbell cam
LPR setup w/ a IPC-B52IR-Z12E S2
