I recently became a home owner and while I love my house and shop, there are a few things that really bother me. My house is basically a 30×60ft two story rectangle, the bottom floor has a walk through and multiple roll up garage doors along the front that lead out to a 20ft covered carport down the entire length of the house. This setup is fantastic for rainy days but has the drawback that if anyone pulls up close enough to the carport, or under the carport you cannot see them from the upstairs windows. Another fantastic feature and drawback of my house is that it is so well insulated you cannot hear people pull up either. It is located just outside of the city limits, but still close enough for your local undesirables to be within easy walking distance as well.
I started out looking for maybe just a couple of cameras to place under the carport and give a view of the driveway and carport, maybe with some sort of censor to alert me via text or something whenever someone pulled into the driveway. I have since come to realize that I would be much better off developing a plan for a full security system, even if I implement it in stages.
In that regard, I would like to put together a system running on Blue Iris, I have priced some of the Dell Outlet units and feel that I can easily pick one of them up, and depending on the model upgrade the ram or the operating system (win 11 pro over home) and add an 18tb Seagate hdd and still be within the same budget or cheaper than an NVR capable of the same performance (around $1,000). Being a hobby PC builder I threw together a parts list for a dedicated build and came out at $1400, with my dedicated build I have 32gb of ram instead of 16, and a dedicated gpu for extra processing power with AI functionality. And I also have 3 empty hdd bays and sata headers for upgrades, as well as an 80+ Platinum ATX PSU, and in the future when necessary upgrades will consist of cpu, mobo, and ram, instead of buying an entire new unit. I am still undecided about which route to go in this regard.
I have absolutely no idea what cameras are going to do the job I would like. I am going to attach an overhead view of the two buildings with what I think are the best placement for cameras. The building on the left is my shop, there are 2 doors on the front, one on the back, the house has only doors on the front wall under the carport and no windows on ground floor. There are 2 cameras in each building marked in blue, these will be interior, one facing the rear of the shop and one the front. One facing the doors inside the house the other in the stairwell leading to the living area of the house. The rest of the cameras will be exterior, I would like to be able to pull licence plates and clearly see faces. Not sure if this is possible at night, but I am also not opposed to building some IR illuminators with decent throw and aiming them down the driveways, and/or having some more floody ir illuminators under the carport and/or on front and back of shop potentially connected to motion sensors. Please lend me your expertise and butcher my plans if it is warranted.
Edited to add: I would really prefer to use as small of a camera as possible to make them less noticable. It might seem kind of silly to worry about but I don't really want people to drive by and see tons of massive security cameras and think I am some sort of crazy paranoid.
I started out looking for maybe just a couple of cameras to place under the carport and give a view of the driveway and carport, maybe with some sort of censor to alert me via text or something whenever someone pulled into the driveway. I have since come to realize that I would be much better off developing a plan for a full security system, even if I implement it in stages.
In that regard, I would like to put together a system running on Blue Iris, I have priced some of the Dell Outlet units and feel that I can easily pick one of them up, and depending on the model upgrade the ram or the operating system (win 11 pro over home) and add an 18tb Seagate hdd and still be within the same budget or cheaper than an NVR capable of the same performance (around $1,000). Being a hobby PC builder I threw together a parts list for a dedicated build and came out at $1400, with my dedicated build I have 32gb of ram instead of 16, and a dedicated gpu for extra processing power with AI functionality. And I also have 3 empty hdd bays and sata headers for upgrades, as well as an 80+ Platinum ATX PSU, and in the future when necessary upgrades will consist of cpu, mobo, and ram, instead of buying an entire new unit. I am still undecided about which route to go in this regard.
I have absolutely no idea what cameras are going to do the job I would like. I am going to attach an overhead view of the two buildings with what I think are the best placement for cameras. The building on the left is my shop, there are 2 doors on the front, one on the back, the house has only doors on the front wall under the carport and no windows on ground floor. There are 2 cameras in each building marked in blue, these will be interior, one facing the rear of the shop and one the front. One facing the doors inside the house the other in the stairwell leading to the living area of the house. The rest of the cameras will be exterior, I would like to be able to pull licence plates and clearly see faces. Not sure if this is possible at night, but I am also not opposed to building some IR illuminators with decent throw and aiming them down the driveways, and/or having some more floody ir illuminators under the carport and/or on front and back of shop potentially connected to motion sensors. Please lend me your expertise and butcher my plans if it is warranted.
Edited to add: I would really prefer to use as small of a camera as possible to make them less noticable. It might seem kind of silly to worry about but I don't really want people to drive by and see tons of massive security cameras and think I am some sort of crazy paranoid.
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