Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:
- Something interesting that happened to you
- Something humourous that happened to you
- Something frustrating that happened to you
- A quick question
- A request for recommendations
- Pictures of your pet
- A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
So how’s it going?
It begins! Here’s a mug of kool-aid ;) So, who’s taking odds on TTC and TTA*?
There’s a legitimate criticisms to be made of Ubiquiti’s products, but they perform very well, are relatively simple to setup and maintain and most importantly for me, you get a perpetual license in the up front purchase price - no annual ransomware like other similar providers. Plus you can host the controller yourself, you don’t have to be tied to their cloud offering (if they even still bother with it).
I haven’t setup their built-in ad blocking yet as the local DNS was a bit of a pain so I still use pi-hole for all my own home stuff’s DNS anyway, and I have wireguard running off their box as I set that up when their implementation was very new and not quite what I was after. But only a matter of time before I switch to the same setup as yours.
*(time till cameras, time till access-points)!
Actually on cameras, I think Ubiquiti are adding Onvif support to Protect which should let you add non-Ubiquiti cameras to their setup too. Of course then you won’t get the special detection features so i’ll continue to use frigate & offload the “is human?” analysis to a GPU.
I’ve been looking at Reolink with built in detection. Would I still need frigate?
I’d want it integrated with Home Assistant anyway, so might not even need Unifi Protect in the stack.
I really like the frigate project, and the detection models it has are really really good, and that meant I could use really cheap Amcrest (I think) cameras because the brains was on the server end rather than camera end. Plus I kinda prefer the device side to be as dumb as possible as they can often have all sorts of vulnerabilities baked in the more IoT they are.
Though I also really hate Home Assistant so I use Frigate as a standalone app, and I manage notifications in a somewhat roundabout way (mqtt -> loki -> grafana -> pushover). I did that because I got heartily sick of how awful Home Assistant was at determining whether I was, or was not at home.
So now I use Unpoller to get my device states from the UDM, that gets stored in prometheus, and my Grafana alert rule works out if my partner or I are at home based on our device being connected to the WiFi or not; then each MQTT event for a detection it only sends a notification if both phones are away.
Haha I fought with Home Assistant on the home/not home thing too. It’s really food now, though. I think the issue is HA uses the google significant motion update, so it doesn’t get realtime location data but instead updates on some black box google schedule. They have a high accuracy mode but it still doesn’t seem to poll regularly. It’s unclear to me exactly what changes.
On my phone I also use PhoneTrack synced to Nextcloud for location tracking, and that updates every minute. I think this seems to allow HA to get more frequent updates, as it works great for me now. Still a massive problem on my wife’s phone, who has no need for PhoneTrack. Detecting WiFi network is my next plan for her, which you can do in HA as well.
What trouble did you have with local DNS? I haven’t had any issues.
What I like about Pi-hole is the control. With the block ads setting here, it’s a checkbox on or off. Pi-hole lets me add custom block lists, and see a log of what’s being blocked to help me resolve issues with sites not working.
Annoyingly I have Amplify APs which while made by Ubiquiti they aren’t compatible with the Unifi range in terms of controller. They work fine but I have to manage them separately.
Its only recent releases of Unifi Network that have made it easy to setup local DNS entries - it used to be very kludgy or not possible back when I first deployed PiHole as DNS for me.