Hi,
What is the best brand of IP camera & node for use with the dashboards & maybe alerting?
Thanks
@bceyresy,
Which kind of alerting did you have in mind?
Hi,
Initially it will just need to pull a live stream through onto a dashboard.
Possibly need a NVR solution to hold footage.
The alerting may need to be based on analysing the images of a boiler in a plant room. It may need to monitor the condition some how for changes . Not sure how this could be achieved.
Thanks
Symon
If you buy an IP camera that supports Onvif event streaming, you can use my Onvif event node. There are camera's that support AI, so they can recognise e.g. persons, pets, vehicles. But of course the more you pay, the better the processor is. For lower budget camera's the AI might give a lot of false positives. Although I have to admit that the Reolink video doorbell which I installed recently, does a pretty good job for person recognition.
Not sure what you mean by analysing the images of a boiler, but if you want to do fancy recognition stuff on your images then your camera probably won't be able to do that. In that case you can get your image from your camera and do the recognition e.g. in Node-RED, and you probably don't need to get events from your camera. In that case you need to find a camera that supports:
- snapshot image capturing (which most cams support): if you only want to capture an image every N minutes
- mjpeg stream: to get jpeg images at higher frame rates
- rtsp stream: most popular for viewing and recording. But in this case it will be rather cpu intensitive to extract the images from the stream, in order to be able to do recogntion on those images...
Might help if you explain a bit more how often you want to analyze your images, and what you want to monitor on those images...
2 Likes
You should look at Frigate for this (and indeed Frigate + which is the paid version) - you can feed it your own models for object recognition.
It comes with GO2RTC inbult in the docker image and is able to output various types of web streams
I use it in conjunction with Dahua TIOC Cameras and a Reolink Doorbell
Craig
3 Likes
Hi,
as @BartButenaers and @craigcurtin mentioned there are several ways to achieve your goal. It depends on your preference.
I'm using BlueIris as a NVR solution and all my alerts are fed into NodeRed (including alert Image) and showning on my NR dashboard
BlueIris is using AI to analyze your camera-feed and can detect lots of things like people(including recognizing approved people),animals,motion and tools. You can easily setup a BlueIris environment and test it out before integrating into Node-Red
Node-Red is also providing you the option of showing a livestream (via http) of your camera, but this caused some resource problems for me and I do not use it anymore.
So, your choice on what suits you best 
.. have fun
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Hi @xx_Nexus_xx,
Am I correct that you don't capture the video streams with Node-RED and send the images to BlueIris for recognition, but that you do it the other way around: capture the streams with BlueIris and only send alerts to Node-RED?
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Hi Bart,
I use all the capabilities of BlueIris AI analytics and only send the results via MQTT to NodeRed for display and Alarm purposes
- BlueIris is recording 8 different camera's 24x7 and store streams on NAS
- AI is analyzing based on motion and line-crossing events
- known persons on property ==> info to NodeRed
- unknown person on property ==> alarm to NodeRed
- cars in driveway ==> info to NodeRed
- animals on property ==> info to Node-Red
- MQTT Alert is send to NodeRed providing image and AI analytical results for further processing
- A Camera Dashboard is showing last 10 events (with picture) per camera
- Based on NodeRed AlarmState (Home, Away,OFF) the alarm is send to
- mobile phone (via Telegram)
- TTS system to inform everybody in the house
- indoor/outdoor Alarm Speaker (increasing alam noise over specified period)
- NodeRed AlarmState can be controlled via Telegram or via SIRI devices (iPhone,iWatch,etc)
I can watch the camera-live feed from NodeRed (HTTP Stream via iFrame) but barely use it
2 Likes
Thanks for the extensive info!!
Which hardware do you need for something like this?
1 Like
Thanks for all the reply's,
I will go and check out everything you have all mentioned and post back.
All the best
Sy
Hi, I have a few old laptops from ebay which I got cheap (3 laptops ~$400 AUD).. I use laptops to overcome power-failures .. below equipment was less than $900 AUD
Dedicated BlueIris System:
- 1 x old hand laptop i7-gen8
- 8GB ram, 256GB SSD, GTX graphics card (better for BlueIris)
- Windows 11 OS
- BlueIris & Codeproject AI
Docker-Backend-System for Node-Red, MQTT, Databases and other stuff
- 2 x old laptop i7-gen8
- 4/8 GB ram, 256 SSD
- Ubuntu & Docker&Portainer
QNAP-NAS for video storage / NVR * Storage for docker-containers&data
- 2nd hand QNAP NAS with 1.6GHZ CPU & 2x 1GB LAN
- 5 x 4tb hard disk
- 1 x 2nd hand UPS
Initially I was running my docker environments on RPi but over time it was not reliable and performant enough. The laptops are now providing more than enough performance for all docker requirements and for BlueIris.
2 Likes
As a counterpoint (although i am not as far along in my Frigate Journey as @xx_Nexus_xx is with Blue Iris
I run it in Docker on an AMD 5400G with 16GB RAM - this is my main storage server in the house and stores all of our media - plus 90 days of motion and events from our 8 cameras (as well as 1 weeks 24/7 recordings)
I have a pair of 12TB Purple drives that are dedicated to the task and they are a MDADM RAID 1 pair under Linux.
The box also has a Coral USB TPU
THis box has been my main storage server for about 12 years now - every 3 years or so i replace the processor and motherboard
Craig
1 Like
Yes, coming back to the initial question .. .. I have tested various cameras but most recently I'm using this camera in 8MP version
The camera has great night-vision (which is important for me) even with color-night-vision option and is providing AI capability for People and Line-Crossing (among others).
Additionally the camera does fully support ONVIF with the AI features and can therefore be used with the ONVIF event node (mentioned by @BartButenaers above)
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@xx_Nexus_xx How well does MQTT handle images? Are those small images or large ones base64 encoded? I've never transmitted anything more than telemetry on MQTT because I thought it couldn't handle it. For reference I'll also have about 10 cameras.
I am sending many images 1024x768 via MQTT locally in my network, no problem. For testing purpose I did the same using a MQTT cloud service. It worked the same, very well, but be careful, depending on the cost plan you might have
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I looked at this camera and it has great specs, however I need one with a local SD storage, do they offer another model that has SD Card?
I have a Unifi Network, so mine will be a bias response 
But I use Unifi Protect (on a Cloud Key Gen 2+) - all storage is local and is recording 24/7 on an 500GB SSD
Not a cheap setup, but I am on the Unifi Eco System - so makes sense for my needs.
Still, if you ever need a bigger surveillance setup - Unifi isn't a bad thing to Look at for it
Can you pump a RTSP stream at like 1080p@30fps with multiple cameras base64 encoded on MQTT? I feel like this will absolutely kill Mosquitto.
Sorrry, I don't think that you can stream over MQTT at all, this is not a realtime system.
I only send my pictures (4k resolition) over MQTT whenever BlueIris has detected a confirmed alert.
I was runnning a test a while back, sending 4k pictures from each (8) camera every minute to Node-red and there was no issue at all
I'm running a UNIFI network as well and it performs amazingly well. However, I'm not using the unifi surveilance system due to cost aspects ... but yes .. the unifi cameras have really good build an picture quality .. just with a high price tag
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