I have a lot going on in one post, I ask for your patience.
My wife and I have recently purchased a new home and we'll be closing and moving in inside 2 weeks (about the 9th or 10th of next month). I've decided that Sighthound is going to replace my aging Logitech Alert system, new home, time for an upgrade
So Sighthound will be the software component of the camera system, but I'm also planning some home automation to go with this as well. So I'll start by trying to detail out the plan best I can and ask for suggestions at the end.
First my experience / current system and home : I'm currently living in a 900 sq ft ranch with my wife and two young children, we need more space. I cover the front of my home with an Alert 750e outdoor cammera, and I cover the basement windows with an indoor alert camera. The outdoor cam supports night vision, wide field of view to cover porch and driveway. My system runs from my custom build desktop PC, I have a RAID array with 1.5Tb for the video recordings. I supplement the video system with a commercial alarm system from a local company which we will be moving to the new home (it's only the traditional door and window sensors, but it nets me a savings on my homeowners insurance). And really that's about all for security and automation right now... I've been in IT for 20 years, and I run my own wiring.
New Home planning (new home is 2 story with 2300 sq ft): First things first, I'm going to purchase a Nest Gen3 thermostat, and I'm planning the purchase of the Nest Protect Gen 2 smoke/co2 detectors (new home has hardwired points for smoke detectors one on each floor, plus I will add one per bedroom 6 total. The commercial alarm company has a moving special, so I plan to let them monitor the doors and windows as before.
Now to the meat of the issue, camera's for the new house... First, I would really like to find a front door intercom system that I could hook the camera into Sighthound with (if possible), capture the video in Sighthound but allow the system to function as normal so my wife can use it to see who's at the door etc. Next, the home is on a corner lot, and I was thinking that I really only need 2 more camera's, one to cover the back of the house/yard and one to cover the front drive/yard (with the 3rd as the video doorbell covering the front porch). Ideally I'd be able to capture any potential package thief from 2 angles that way. I've very torn on the camera's, and basically I'm not even going to list all the camera's I've looked at. I prefer "hard wired" POE so that I can put them on a UPS battery backup from a main POE switch, but I am open to other suggestions (if there is a camera out there with built-in battery backup / wifi and the install is simple, sure that might win out over me having to run CAT5e/6). I'm also unsure if I should go the whole PTZ camera route or not...
So other than camera suggestions, has anyone got any cool Home Automation suggestions around using Sighthound and other solutions? So far about the only thing I've come up with is lights, and have them flash red if the smoke alarms go off...
Much appreciated!
