Fitting IP cameras to replace the expensive Amazon Blink toys

I've had several Blink cameras over the past 5 years to keep an eye on various properties and alert me to unexpected rovers. Initially this setup was used to keep an eye on my late mother's home while it remained unoccupied ahead of being sold. Then I installed them at our property following the theft of some ladders from outside the workshop (where arguably I shouldn't have left them) and then finally I installed a set at my mother in laws to keep an eye on comings and goings. She's moved out now, so I have no further need for them

The Blink system is functional but pretty basic and has some unwanted features:

• Connection is by wifi, so can be rather patchy and may throttle the bandwidth.
• The video clips are held on the Amazon cloud. While this means it's easy to access from anywhere on the internet, you have to pay for their service - currently £80 a year.
• Although you can choose to operate the system without using their cloud service (storing clips to a local USB storage device), it makes accessing them remotely rather painful.
• The cameras are battery powered and need lithium AA batteries which aren't cheap.
• Being battery powered, you can only see clips that have been triggered by the camera's inbuilt motion detection. There's no possibility of continuously streamed video.
• Recently, Blink have been offering a basic "AI" enhancement that does some rudimentary identification of moving subjects. Of course this would cost you extra dosh on top of the basic £80 subscription, taking you up to £150 a year - per site.
• Being a closed, proprietary system, you have very limited ability to modify or enhance the capabilities of the system.

So, one of the benefits of installing Home Assistant is the option to integrate IP cameras into the existing setup. And specifically for these devices, there are some pretty powerful extensions that enable AI-assisted identification of subjects / objects in the field of view, such as the Frigate Network Video Recorder (NVR).

My Raspberry Pi 5 is powerful enough for most of the tasks I expect of it, otherwise I'd need to have fitted an actual PC. However, the AI object detection function is quite intensive and would most likely overcome the RPi, so I've added a Coral USB accelerator TPU that offloads that burden. It just plugs in to a USB3 port on the RPi and like most of these Home Assistant extensions, the installation is very quick and seamless.

Firstly, I've installed an Empiretech IPC-T28IR-AS-S3 3.6mm dome camera which requires a PoE connection for power and comms. This has excellent low light sensitivity and good HD 8MP resolution (3840 × 2160). I've fitted it with its own 128GB microSD, so it has its own storage on top of the NVR system.

The mounting base houses a waterproof ethernet connection and a (redundant) power jack.

The cable has a polythene outer coat for outdoor use. I blasted a hole through the wall next to the fibre cable. Looks almost decent by my standards:

I've got Claude Code installed in the RPi itself, which is dead handy - I can literally just ask it to install stuff and it will do so, with CLI instructions I'd never stand a hope in hell of understanding, sent directly to the various peripherals, then set up the various options within Home Assistant and Frigate (in this case) to customise it to my liking and situation. It sorted out this camera config in no time, rotating the video to account for the orientation of my setup and turning off black and white night vision.

As for the Blink doorbell, it uses the same infrastructure - with the added feature of a door chime of course. It can take its power from an existing traditional (24Vac?) bell circuit but relies on wifi for the video feed. 

I've replaced it with a Reolink PoE doorbell, which means I need to run another ethernet cable from the front door to the Home Assistant system under the stairs. I connected the bell supply to it, so it may continue to work even if the Frigate system goes down.

This has a 5MP (2K) sensor, microphone and speaker, if you like that sort of thing. Although Reolink offer an app, this device integrates nicely into Frigate / HA, so once set up in the Reolink app, everything is handled by Frigate. And of course, the resident Claude Code agent actually does most of the work - my kind of setup!

The view from up there is pretty good. And the low light sensitivity is good enough that it doesn't need to revert to black and white night vision, largely due to the street light directly outside our house.

On the face of it, the doorbell doesn't show a lot more than the dome camera but it's there for a different reason and has lower resolution.

I've set boundaries for the main camera. The object detection is within the camera software (rather than Frigate) and seems to determine where people's feet are and use that to determine if they are within the boundary. It seems to work OK now, ignoring pedestrians and traffic on the road and pavement outside our driveway.

I've enabled facial recognition in Frigate, so now it will begin to build up a collection of recognised faces and objects as they are encountered. I will then be able to go in later on and name them. Then I will be able to set alerts eg when The Domestic Manager has returned home, a stranger is on the driveway or the neighbour's cat has come into our front garden. This object recognition is done by Frigate using the power and might of the Coral TPU.

Bench testing the TIG button torch controller - there's life in it!

Finally, after about a week of feeling shit, the balance between moping about with a snotty / stuffy head cold on the one hand and moping about doing nothing has shifted to the point where I just need to get on and do something, anything, before I lose the plot. 

I've been looking forward to testing this TIG button control for the Arc Captain TIG welder and it looks as if today's the day. It's tempting just to fit it to the torch, plug it in and see if it works. However, it would be a good idea to test it out on the bench first. It's quite possible that it won't so well on the torch with the HF start circuit active and/or the arc running, in which case, it would be good to know if/that the basic circuit itself actually works as intended beforehand.

So, out with the bench PSU and a DVM:

This is the smaller of the 2 PSRs I got from Amazon, which claims to be good for 3g - 500g 

First signs are encouraging. Pressing the PSR pad causes the LED to light up and the THRESH pot changes the level at which this occurs. Similarly, applying a fixed load (weight) to the PSR and twiddling the SENS pot varies the output voltage. So, on the face of it we have a functioning circuit. Of course, that may change when there's a welder arcing away in the background - but one step at a time etc.

If anything, the required pressure feels a bit excessive but I'm still needing to design a housing for the circuit and some form of finger pad that will apply the pressure to the PSR element. I may finesse the circuit values 

This is the circuit that does the gain control and level shifting:

But for now, I think I'm in the right ballpark, so I'll leave it for now.

The main ball ache is the fact that the TIG welder doesn't actually respond to inputs from the torch or pedal controls. I've been communicating with the Arc Captain team for some weeks now but so far I'm far from seeing any glimpse of a cigar. Will I be able to get a replacement out of them? I'd like to be able to control the arc from the torch as it is - but also how am I to prove out this TIG button if the welder doesn't take any notice of the input?

I may need to establish whether the TIG button circuit continues to behave when it's fitted to the torch body and the arc (and HF) are active. That must be quite a test for any torch-mounted circuit on a good day.

So, as a first test, I seem to be seeing signs of success. Let's see what happens next, when I install it on the machine and fire up the arc....