Updates ---
First, much gratitude to
@wittaj @looney2ns & everyone else who substantially shortened the learning curve.
I have to wrap this up in a few days & head back home, so I've taken a few shortcuts for now which seem to be stable and working.
I'm having a shit-ton of difficulty dialing in some of the cameras in inside zones at night. The image is there, I can certainly see myself walking around in the dark, but IVS triggering is haphazard at night. I've calibrated it and it works better, especially in daytime, but still have some work to do with a few cams at night. I'm back to the
Blue Iris Motion detector in those zones, which seems to work much better. I've installed a Coral AI Edge TPU for AI and it works fairly well (although I have to tweak that). I'm getting detections faster than 60ms, a substantial improvement and it's not bogging down my CPU. Turned off static image analysis and only analysis on motion triggers so it wouldn't constantly ping the server. Here's what I got, in case anyone else is interested:
It's dual edge, M.2 E key. I was not sure if it would work in the wifi slot when I ordered, and since I'm pressed for time, I went with a cheap PCIE adapter card as well.
Almost plug and play. Followed the directions to install the drivers, turned it on, turned off Yolo, and Wala, it works. The single ones I saw on Amazon did not list Windows compatibility, so I did not want to take a chance. This one did.
For the rest of the zones, especially ones in the wind outside, sticking with IVS. Those get enough ambient light at night to not cause the same issues I'm having in a dark garage and other areas.
Next on deck is to lock down the network (which I know how to do) then open it up via VPN before I leave. I tested it with port forwarding and DynDns with wifi off to make sure it works, then locked the port down. Waiting for my router to show up tomorrow so I can finish it.
When I get back home, I'll likely order a few cams and continue this journey (which has now turned into a hobby). I can see how the few Ring cams I have at home are totally over-priced POS compared to this stuff. And... their AI is nothing to speak of. The indoor cam constantly mistakes my 10lb small dog for a human every time it gets up on the couch in front of the camera.
Thanks again for all the help.