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.
Sorry about your cat. We typically have a Rover stop in to check on our cats when we’re gone for a bit; it’s nice to get them some human interaction and they always send pictures and give updates.
I personally have a camera setup inside that just streams to HomeAssistant so we can check on them ourselves when we’re out just for the weekend. I disconnect it when Rovers are stopping by though because I don’t want them to feel spied on. No need for anything fancy really, but if you really want NVR I just use Frigate (for other things, the cat camera really is just a stream). It’s free and open source and really easy to set up.
WireGuard is a very easy way to set up the access. My router has just the single WireGuard UDP port forwarded
I’ve never messed with home assistant. Is it very simple to set up for a live stream like this? I agree that that the NVR solutions seem like overkill for my needs.
I’ve done some reading on setting up wiregaurd in the past, but havent actually deployed it before either. For a short term solution, opening up a port for it seems like a good compromise.