Motion Sensors and Home Security Gadgets Without Cameras

Aliexpress also sells bunch of no-name Zigbee motion sensors, proximity sensors to detect if door/window or whatever is open, which work with Home Assistant through Zigbee2Mqtt. I tried some with good reviews and found them to work allright.

I get that it is a cheaper solution, but how pleased are you with responsiveness and reliability of the IKEA stuff?

Keep in mind that often motion sensing isn't what someone wants... great for hallways, doorways, and transitional space where someone is expected to be moving, but not great if you're going to be sitting for a bit. Presence sensing is a little more expensive but has gotten a lot better (millimeter wave stuff), great for something like a bathroom or kitchen where you might be sitting for a while but still want the lights on.

I agree that Z-Wave products are top tier. As well as SONOFF, but the particular model you linked has decidedly been one of the worst mmWave sensors in the general options available by any manufacturer. No idea why, but they never report presence or lux properly.

If one doesn't want to invest in Z-Wave I'd say grab some of the Aqara FP1/FP2 sensors. The FP2 gives you full room zone presence detection, so you can put it in your kitchen/dining room and set up predefined areas and it'll expose those as their own presence zones.

If you don't need that level of granularity, the generic Tuya mmWave sensors on Amazon, or elsewhere, are a solid option. Super discrete, plenty of tuning parameters, and good smart home platform integration. I prefer the ZigBee ones because the WiFi ones can be a little noisy on your LAN (traffic not interference).

Reolink cameras, but don't give them access to the internet, you can run a local ntp server for time sync

Frigate for video recording, even if you use none of the GPU based object detection features it does a fine job of recording and live view from a browser.

The machine running frigate may need to be some kind of private VPN client for remote access depending on how your ISP is setup.

Frigate will really work with a huge selection of random h264 rtsp stream cameras. You can use a mix of high end high quality expensive cameras and cheap ones to monitor less important spots.

Reolink doorbell camera will work natively in frigate with bidirectional audio via html5/webrtc in a browser to listen and talk to people.

I've had really great success with the TP-Link Tapo cameras. I have a number of their models, and they're all rock solid. Both in build, and image quality.

What drew me to them is that they have RTSP (and ONVIF for their PTZ models) built in, so you're not beholden to their app. I use them paired with Frigate, but they also all include an SD card slot for local recording.

They have on-camera detection for people, pets, cars, etc. No obligation to use their cloud services (I have them on an IoT VLAN with internet access disabled, and have never had an issue). If you're not using your own NVR then you'll probably have to keep them internet accessible for remote viewing.

Cameras have been in the Texas elements for a few years now and the streams look like they did brand new. I'd say my only complaint about them is that the mounts are oddly designed, but perfectly usable as is. 3D printing largely makes that a non-issue, though.

I've been looking into UniFi (Ubiquiti) and it seems like a decent option.

- get a cheapo chinese camera supported by thingino firmware

- install FW.

- extra: install open source NVR like frigade and connect these cameras, preferably over ethernet not wifi.

- extra extra: have a separate VLAN for these cameras.

Now you have a secure isolated system. If you want a remote viewer, you can have a vpn tunnel to your nvr to access it from anywhere in the world.

It’s a perfect system but way more secure than anything consumer out there