Friends I have who live there are thrilled with the system although the Seattle police seem to have little interest in the system telling the residents that they are only interested in seeing footage that shows suspicious activities or is directly related to a crime.
Porch pirates are so bad in my new neighborhood that I admit to wanting one of these on my dead-end culdesac and have investigated what it would take to build such a system myself.
2. Create a backend that queries each camera for their current image.
3. Run the images through some object recognition neural network (fastai has some great object recognition tutorials).
4. Make your backend stitch together the images from each camera to make a video of what was being recognized when objects of interest were detected (each camera will create its own video)
5. Create a nice little UI/App for everyone to view the movies with some filtering in place (time of day, object(s) of interest).
I want to create something like this as well. All of the pieces seem to be pretty straightforward to me except for figuring out power and network connectivity. I guess each neighbor would have to configure the device to use their SSID... and hope someone doesn't steal the raspberry pi and get the SSID credentials from memory... Maybe just make the neighbors use a separate network?
https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
Also at: http://doc.openalpr.com/opensource.html
And a ready-to-go version you can buy/subscribe based on their stuff:
There seems to be four things on here: - an avon lady over agressively spamming her stuff (blocked) - people asking for small job recommendations (who should I get to fix my garden gate, babysitter, tv ariel fitting) - some notices about local events (when / where fireworks, Remembrence, carolling) - group commiseration that one time some group was speeding all over town at midnight running red lights and keeping us up with their skidding and revving.
Honestly pretty good. I see it maybe once a week.
https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/About-android-app-permis...
I wouldn't allow it to do so, so I assume it asked, I said no, and we moved on.
"I saw a suspicious man walking down the street!"
"What made him suspicious?"
"He just doesn't look like he belongs here."
"Why?"
"He's black"
"Being black isn't suspicious"
I then I get an email from Next-door about my comments being reported!
Deleted that cesspool after confirming it was just another fear-inducer service for people who get off on that.
I have a Ring and some of it is just downright funny.
> "suspicious person on my porch, be on the look out!" >> "um, that's the mailman."
More often it's almost solely profit-driven.
For example, in the 90s a lot of people thought everyone would host their own email servers. In reality, consumers flocked to Y! mail and later Gmail, since most people really can't or won't do this themselves.
Most people also do not change the oil on their own car (at least in the USA) etc.
In my mind the question is can you develop a great product in this area. It is possible (and sad) that Ring or Nest is as good as it gets (or have default won due to superior distribution). But I do think there are a lot of features I would want as a consumer that would make this experience better for me.
Plus, it seems that the new breed of service companies isn't satisfied with just providing a service in exchange of money. They also use the opportunity to exfiltrate as much data about you as they can get.
Also, in case of cable/Netflix, a lot of downsides are mitigated by piracy. There's no worry you'll be cut off from the entertainment you want, because you can always Torrent it if push comes to shove.
4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch.
Ring is gross enough, thank you very much.