Hey everyone,
We’ve built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We also support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play.
We’ve put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.
The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We’ve also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole camera in the photo.
We’ve been working on this for almost 2 years now, and we look forward to we look forward to seeing what you all think!
These comments are why privacy products will always be behind. Why open-source is full of dead projects. These people are just trying to make a living off making privacy-focused products. And all the comments are like “They’re a for-profit company? They had marketing material prepped to reply to people’s comments?!”.
The code is open-source, self-hostable, built using commodity hardware (raspi), and they’re just trying to make it sustainable by providing an optional paid service. This is not the enemy.
Yeah, free, open source is fun, but we should also just support companies that have good ethics and want to make enough money to earn a living and keep making good products that respect people.
I want utopian space communism, but I’m not going to hold out for only that ideal when I can support alternatives that are better than the current system.
I see this with open source hardware a lot.
People want free hardware. That doesn’t work. Give your money to companies like this.
Why a pi zero I’ve seen something like this done with an esp32 and a pi pico pi zero seems like putting an nvidia 1080 in your nes emu machine
I like what this project is trying to do, self hosted security cameras need to be more accessible to get people to stop using corporate spyware.
Very cool!
Now hack ring cameras so existing installed cams can connect to your own hosted network.
Can I have the video pushed to a self hosted server (eg NAS or proxmox VM) and just have my android be a client of that server?
How does it scale? Can I do 50 cameras?
Can I do 20 users with granular permissions?
The poster’s account is under 1 day old. There are multiple brand new accounts interacting with this post, too.
And one of them is replying with positive sentiment.
But the one calling it sus is also 5 days old, and making good points.
🤔
I guess its just us in here then, among these AI bots.
I’ve been looking for something like this. To be more accurate, I’ve been looking for something that works as a doorbell/intercom, that doesn’t rely on big tech in some way or other. But this seems like a promising start.
I ended up going with Unifi (G4 Pro Doorbell) after my test-run with Reolink went… poorly. It’s technically still ‘big tech’ but all the parts are on my property and my control, and (at least for the doorbell, that’s all I’ve got so far) it works nearly-perfectly with HA (I can’t get custom screen messages to stick when assigned through HA).
Why did you opt for pro vs nonpro out of curiosity?
It’s been a bit but I do remember I wanted the bigger screen, the fingerprint and nfc readers are nice to integrate ‘eventually’, and I think it was only an extra like $75? Oh, and the secondary package cam, that was the main factor tbh.
I wanted to get the poe version + their chime, but I got vetoed since ‘we already have a mechanic chime’ and I don’t have PoE setup in the house. But my pitch for the pro model was successful and an easy sell.
The only thing worse than your partner vetoing you is when they’re right.
Thank you for the response, very informative!
Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.
I bought a unit + 4tb surveillance drive, to replace a (what we thought was a) dying nest hardwired gen2 doorbell. I was excited - pulled it out of the box, ‘oh, it has an AC brick too! I can set it up and make sure it works before we install it’
Prepped the camera, prepped the nas to ingest the feed and drives, setup the non-proprietary stream (the acronym/letters escape me), all on the AC plug… And the feed, from the cam to the reolink app absolutely ground to a halt. I’m talking like, after 5 minutes of uptime, the feed was 60+ seconds behind. Absolutely wild. I restarted the app, phone, doorbell, no fix. I turned off the open-source (?) feed, going with only reolink’s proprietary stream. Better, but after 10 minutes it was still 30+ seconds behind. Reset the doorbell, set it up again, no change…
So either I got a defective/malfunctioning doorbell, a bad AC plug (but wouldn’t it just die if it was pulling too much power…?), the AC plug isn’t rated for anything more than very intital setup (I saw nothing about that in the instructions, and why would you do that…) or that is ‘working as intended’ which, why even bother if that is true.
B&H accepted both doorbell and drive, opened, no questions asked. Was very excited and it genuinely ruined my day. :(
Sorry to hear your bad experience. Was the acronym you were looking for ONVIF?
Yeah, that’s it!
I’ll wait.
From a quick glance at the repo?
The commits generally come hot and heavy. Going back to the earlier 2025 commits and the messages mostly look like what you would expect from folk raw dogging
main. Arrdalan in particular looks “real”-ish. Whereas jkaczman is already showing signs of the kinds of commit messages that claude et al generate, but those ARE based off certain style guides.Roll up to 2026 and I can see 11 commits on May 17 alone, they all look like claude messages, some are outright just arbitrarily changing magic hashes, and there are little to no comments.
Not gonna fully call this ai slop but, it is REAL flipping sus as it were. At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.
Those 11 commits were from a rebase-and-merge PR, which changes the date from the original commit. Notice how there’s a week gap between those and the prior commits on the main branch.
The only thing AI is used on in this project is strictly for user interface work (our website, the front-end for the mobile app, the front-end for the deploy tool). We carefully vet anything like that.
Fair enough. I’ll still say that is bad engineering but acknowledge that starts to get into the realm of taste.
Either way, in the past 24 days you have MR commits on 8 of those and April looks similar. The code is generally poorly documented and skimming the closed MRs, I am not seeing much discussion or review in any of them. So I stand by
At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.
Fair points. I appreciate the constructive criticism! Moving forward, we will improve on our documentation. In terms of review, we always review and test each other’s code (sometimes via other mode of communication), even if there weren’t any comments on the pull request.
Use at your own risk.
What an amazing conclusion, and the best part is, no matter what you’ve been waffling about before - it’s always right. Can we stop calling random things AI slop and telling to be careful bEcAuSe iTs Ai sLoP, and back to being cautious until something has been reviewed properly? Being careful with random stuff from GitHub you install and run in your private network?
Your whole comment may have been AI slop as well. “From a quick glance at the repo”, you should be careful! Thanks, Sherlock.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability NAS Network-Attached Storage NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PoE Power over Ethernet Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #312 for this comm, first seen 24th May 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’m sorry, but it’s a pretty big oversight to push the security aspect so hard that you don’t say a single thing about the actual camera. Nothing on the functionality, specs, etc…
Sorry about that! Is there anything specific I can answer?
The base runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. This is capable of running motion and AI detection (human/pet/vehicle). It supports live-streaming and motion/ai-detected events, which sends a 20 second video clip to the mobile app. All of this is end to end encrypted.
With DIY, you’re able to pick between an OV5647 and IMX219 sensor (Raspberry Pi Camera Module V1 and V2 respectively). With V1, it’s 1296x972. With V2, it’s 1640x1232 (97.4% of 1080p).
If you’re selling a complete package you should probably tell people what the specs they’re getting. But there’s nothing about the software features either. Besides security what does the firmware and software offer?
Exited to see more! Keep up the good work!
What temp ranges are these good for? Can it run off solar+battery?
How are you protecting against supply chain attacks?
Hi Brkdncr, thanks for the question!
We honestly do not have a concrete answer for the temp ranges. We’ve done some testing and made sure they stay under 150F in the 3D case shown in the picture.
We do not currently directly support solar/battery usage. You can probably DIY something together though!
For Software: We’ve started to thoroughly go through our dependencies by using the Cargo Vet tool, in addition to looking for unmaintained dependencies, dependencies that we can replace with a few lines of code, etc.
For Hardware: We’re using trusted hardware providers like Raspberry Pi to try to mitigate this.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Cargo is a red flag. It doesn’t verify any cryptographic signatures of what it downloads, unlike apt and maven.
