Around the time I did this project, Ring cameras were starting to become A Thing but there were a few things that kept me from getting one: I didn’t want to enter the Amazon ecosystem, I didn’t want something that would send video to Amazon’s cloud, approval was unclear in my condo HOA, and I didn’t want an obvious camera hanging on my front door. So I put together this stealthy setup that achieved all of what I wanted but looked like I hadn’t changed a thing.
After removing the stock peephole in my door, the setup was a Raspberry Pi ZeroW with a slightly modified camera and a lens that looked remarkably like a normal peephole lens. I customized a 3D-printed case for it, used a couple of 3M strips to attach it to the door, and ran an extra long micro-USB cable for power. We already had put a coatrack on the back of the door so after dressing the cabling and putting in some cord covers, you really couldn’t tell it was there.
For running the whole shebang I used motionEye. Once configured and dialed in, it was pretty easy to then get piped into Home Assistant and any plugins going on from there. I was pretty happy with the result. Even as Rings did start getting phased in, it was nice knowing that our setup looked normal without a big “HI I’M A CAMERA” hanging on the outside of the door.
The plan is to recreate this again now that we’ve moved, but upgrade the hardware by using a Pi Zero 2W and maybe leveraging the hardware to do H.264 encoding on the device rather than at the server. Current status is “sitting in clips on my workbench with hardware proven, software still WiP”.