Big fan of open source, but this is not workable.

[adouglas]

I bought a camera, doesn't really work of course, like most things most of the time.

So I think maybe there is an open source project to make a good camera solution for monitoring you home. Very very common problem, maybe some people got together and made some progress.

And they have. And it's great. But it's also kind of a mess, and I'm kind of tired of this always happening. I have participated in a number of open source projects and I try to advocate for their adoption sometimes, and people say "I don't have time". That's the number one argument, all the time.

Sometimes they are wrong, some stuff like linuxcnc is in my experience not any harder to use than the proprietary junk.

However.

I don't need a list of 50 different cameras to sort through, we need a handful of really good ones, good cost to performance ration, highly compatible and ideally themselves open source (would be great to make one with a raspberry pi pico W for instance).

We are already one step backwards by thinking only about a subsection of the actual usable system; just the software. It sounds like great software, but it's only a single module in a larger system. People don't need a jumble of parts that *could* be assembled into a working system. Right now, I need a way to monitor my house when I'm gone. Not a bunch of parts, however nice parts they may be.

I'm not picking on this project, I say the same things on other projects, and I am already spending time making it actually happen elsewhere, I can't do it here as well.

I'm just saying, even as someone with a lot of patience, I'm not doing this. I'm just going to buy like a panasonic camera or something and hope that's good enough, ok. We all have to look up and see the forest for the trees a little better. This perception that "open source" means an ungainly pile of parts that is rather not practical to actually use unfortunately does have a very significant reality to it. I want to do better...

[denver_compdoc]

Over the years, Ive owned many different brands and types of wired outdoor cameras because after years of use, they will either fail or have old software standards and are no longer supported by their manufacturers so cant be updated.

Ive found the $800 cams can fail just like the $80 versions.

So, you might look at types of cams that are in your price range and are easily available, and ask about people's experiences with them.

For instance, I prefer bullet cams to dome cameras, because the night infrared-leds reflect off the dome and obscure the image.