Hey everyone,
We’ve built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We also support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play.
We’ve put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.
The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We’ve also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole camera in the photo.
We’ve been working on this for almost 2 years now, and we look forward to we look forward to seeing what you all think! If you’re interested in our efforts in general outside of DIY, our main website with our pre-built offering is here: click to see our website
Very cool!
This is interesting. Can you give me a ballpark on your hardware cost for an 8 camera system? What does integration for NAS look like?
Finally, open source surveillance
This one won’t automatically be a spy for any agency that asks tho, so that’s cool…
Sousveillance
Surveilance cameras aren’t necessarily a bad thing
Why not just Thingino?
Thingino looks like a great option for changing firmware of IP cameras to be open-source, and is useful in local NVR-like setups! Our goal is to different: provide an end-to-end encrypted, easy-to-configure and easy-to-use WiFi camera.
Nice! I’ve been wondering lately if there was an open-source solution for this
iirc pine64 so has a camera in their store
Great to see.
The ubiquiti bell is the best but it is american and overpriced. I want something that can record, two way talk and display a message. The parcel camera is a bonus. It also needs to be able to be silenced at set times.
I’ll wait.
Can I have the video pushed to a self hosted server (eg NAS or proxmox VM) and just have my android be a client of that server?
In theory, that should be possible. We haven’t tested it.
Isn’t that the premise of the “$4 ubuntu over droplet deployment” option?
Instead of having Secluso-Deploy ssh into some cloud box and prep it up with the server-side software, why not have a container deployment option as well? I get that you want to ensure that the server is publicly reachable for the mobile clients to work on the go, but ultimately (and in all honesty) at this point, that should be a user concern/choice (those more advanced users may be peculiar about running behind tailscale, a home-VPN, a port-routing config, …).
Needless to say, most people here might find it easier to work with containers and build trust in the project by having it run in an isolated environment with limited permissions than blindly trusting that the code is what it says it is and not quietly running a botnet at digitalocean with their PII attached.
I understand your concern. The way we designed the deployment tool was under the assumption people would be using a freshly-deployed cloud single-use server for it (as we assume they have no technical knowledge).
I’m not sure if a container is foolproof. There have been multiple CVEs in the past allowing processes to escape containers through kernel vulnerabilities. Although, I’m happy to put containers on our to-do list if this will help.
As for what the proper solution should be for advanced users, I personally am not sure. I’d need to research that further. We do try to provide things such as reproducible builds, which means if you build the code yourself using our reproducible build script, they’ll match byte-for-byte against our released artifacts. This at least guarantees that it was built from our repository’s code, although it does not guarantee the code itself is safe.
I think something that will help here is our planned third-party security audit, which hopefully will be sometime this summer.
How does it scale? Can I do 50 cameras?
Can I do 20 users with granular permissions?
We’ve only tested with a few cameras, and it’s able to support that well.
We have work in progress for users. We use OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption and it allows for creating groups. We’re using that to allow multiple apps/devices to receive encrypted videos from the camera. We have the core function implemented, but haven’t added UI support in the app for it yet.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PoE Power over Ethernet Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #312 for this comm, first seen 24th May 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
These comments are why privacy and open-source will always be behind. These people are just trying to make a living off making privacy-focused products. And all the comments are like “They’re a for-profit company? They had marketing material prepped to reply to people’s comments?!”. The code is open-source, self-hostable, built using commodity hardware (raspi), and they’re just trying to make it sustainable by providing an optional paid service. This is not the enemy.
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I want utopian space communism, but I’m not going to hold out for only that ideal when I can support alternatives that are better than the current system.
You do you, but I’m holding out for it… and only in fully automated, luxury, gay form.
You have my blessing.
Yeah supporting companies which makes privacy focused products, will create incentives for selling them to people which want them not just gaining additional profits from selling your data or showing you with ads
No good deed goes unpunished. The sense of self entitlement some people display is staggering. FOSS project? Well, you should have done x y or z.
Also, I gave you $3 via Ko-fi, so you need to provide customer support in perpetuity and come to my house and install it. And heaven forbid you try to recoup costs!
Projects don’t just die out - a lot of them are killed (one way or another). For example, I had a fully specced out FPGA design that would capture the signal from Wii GPU and do internal upscaled resolution (think: like what dolphin emulator does but with actual hardware) not just post process sharpening. Total cost under $100 and some know how.
The amount of flack I copped for it made me shut down the github and work on it for myself. Once it’s perfected, I may post about it again but I sure as shit am not compelled to deal with the fucking peanut gallery anymore.
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free. What a blessed utopia that must be.
I used to think Reddit users were too negative. Then I joined Lemmy.
Loud people are negative. Doesn’t matter the website.
Besides, it’s just a good way of doing it. For the people that want to DIY: here’s the instructions. For people that just want the thing: here’s the payment instructions.
Sometimes I just want the thing.
A “privacy product” inherently involves a lot of trust. When the creators are academics with little to no professional footprint, you need to assess things based on what information they do provide you. Whether that be code (yay open source) or customer interactions (forum posts).
I know we all yearn for the days of “Use Google. Their motto is ‘do no evil’ so you know they are our friends!”. But… that was a much stupider time.
Like, even if you suckle at the teat of Saint Capitalism, you should at least want a good product. And… this looks like enthusiast code with minimal maintainability but a heavy emphasis on marketing.
Agreed, however the number of positive comments from one-day old accounts is suspect for me.
This is a security product where trust is paramount, so I get a bit itchy about anything like that, but I could be overreacting.
I can’t speak to the account thing, I checked the guy you replied to and it seems like his is 3 months old, not yesterday.
I wanted to mention that we plan to get a third-party security audit by a reputable firm sometime this summer.
Yea I edited that part because Lemmy was not showing me the right info, but there are more below, which is… Odd.
In any event, great to hear about an SA, and I have starred the project to check it out.
I see this with open source hardware a lot.
People want free hardware. That doesn’t work. Give your money to companies like this.
You can also flash a Wyze Doorbell v1 with Thingino
https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki/Camera:-Wyze-Doorbell-(V1)
Lots of ways self hosting ways of doing bidirectional rtsp doorbell.
Any good open-source nvrs that support bidirectional rtsp? I know zoneminder didn’t last time I checked.
Frigate has support for bidir audio
But it requires SSL to work, and WiFi cameras are not the greatest option for that kind of bandwidth.
I know, I tried it. It never worked right.
Amazing work guys! Looks very promising. If I needed cameras I would use this.
But does it do frigate? Can it be used applessly?
Hi muusemuuse, this is meant to be a drop-in replacement to WiFi cameras (and therefore accessible to non-technical users, easy to use and easy to setup). Frigate is great, and we definitely recommend it if you have the time to get it up and running.
In regard to being able to use it without the app, that’s not possible unfortunately due to the end-to-end encryption that takes place. An application needs to be on the other end to decrypt things.
Our app is available through Obtainium if you do not like the Play Store. It is also reproducible, so you can verify to make sure it was derived from our mobile_client codebase.
Are only VPS relay’s supported at the moment? Presumably so the feed is accessible over the web?
I get that the project seems to be going for replicating a ring/wyze/etc style experience but being able to self-host a relay somehow seems like a logical addition. Would probably have to disavow connecting outside of the home network and leave that the responsibility of the user.
If you’re technical, you could probably put together a locally hosted server on your Linux machine and use Tailscale or something like that, it should work fine with the code as-is. Our server binary is in the runtime-binaries zip in the core GitHub release.
Fair enough. Really appreciate the work ya’ll have put into this, definitely going to have to mess around with it. Just brought it up because of the community this is in.
I would imagine most in this community would opt to use Tailscale or even Headscale rather than relying on a VPS.
I do find it funny how your post on Reddit only got a few upvotes yet here it gets a bunch. Really goes to show you the difference in attitude in each community.
I think the point is to be easier than frigate. Eg a full image like home assistant, not needing to fiddle with docker.
I will keep pushing for my alternative : buy some out-of-order cameras and stick them in highly visible places.
0 maintenance, 0 infrastructure, 100% of the deterring effect working cameras would have had.
That works well enough to deter thieves from stealing your packages. But not so useful when you wake up to find a hit and run driver clipped your parked car over night.
Eh ! If the car still works, who cares ? Besides, if you can afford security cameras and a house, you probably have a garage. Use it.
