My partner and I have a trip planned in about 1.5 weeks, bur cat is unfortunately sickly right now. I’m tasked with setting up a couple of webcams in her favorite spots so we can check on her while we’re away.
Currently we have 1 basic webcam, two functioning Linux desktops, a couple old hard drives i don’t need, a domain name I have grand plans for but have never used, and enough experience with docker and self hosting to be dangerous.
If you were to set up a quick and dirty pet cam with a minimal budget and about a week to buy everything and get it all set up, how would you go about it? I really want a solution requires as little fiddling and config as possible.
I know I’ll need at least one more webcam, and I’ve been researching NVR software all night only to arrive back at idk-what-I’m-doing after hours of reading. I could potentially stretch my budget up to something like a Qnap TS-216G (which is as close to a good solution as I’ve found) since I’ve been wanting to buy a NAS anyways. The QVR software suite seems like a nice solution for easy setup, but I really dont need any advanced AI features. Even basic stuff like motion detection and video storage I could do without, although they would be nice to have.
I’ve never made any services available from outside of my LAN either. From what I’ve read in the past, Tailscale may be the simplest solution for that, but idk if it’s suitable for this type of application.
Edit: I guess I never should have brought up that our cat is sick. Most of y’all seem to think that I’m neglecting my animal or something because I didnt go into detail about all of the care plans that we have in place for her. Her illness is long term and managed by medications. She doesnt have flare-ups or any acute symptoms that are likely to cause an emergency. We have friends that she likes that will be visiting daily to feed and water her, spend time with her, and give her medicine. This camera solution is really just a little something extra to make my partner and I feel better about being away from her.
I’m really sorry that so many people assume you don’t have a normal cat sitter and you simply desire to stalk your cat when you’re not home.
(I personally check my pet camera feeds every day wherever I am, at work, at dinner with friends, at home in my bed, etc because I just love seeing my cats, and they are perfectly healthy. And if I’m on vacation, I would not be satisfied with only a few pics/videos from my sitters. Also useful for giving my sitters a heads up that the one of the cats vomited, so they can mentally prepare themselves before their daily visit.)
I have several Tapo cameras and access the rtsp streams through Frigate. I additionally have Frigate added to my Home Assistant, which is primarily useful in my use case to automatically restart Frigate when one or more cameras is unavailable for 5 minutes (sometimes my streams randomly go down for me and a restart magically fixes it… I’m not sure if this is common or just a me problem).
Home Assistant is exposed to the Internet with my domain using the cloudflare tunnel addon. I access Frigate through the Home Assistant app.
However, this took me overall a few hours every day for about a week to get setup properly. You can skip the Home Assistant step as long as you have a reliable way to restart Frigate if it crashes (or maybe your setup will be more stable than mine and it never crashes!), and access it using Tailscale VPN without a domain.