Don’t make this terrifying smart-home mistake! 

This channel is so underrated. The fact you don't have more subscribers makes no sense at all.

Michael, well done sir! Sorry to hear of your scary situation, but I'm glad that it turned out well. You're an amazing story teller and the production quality of this video looks as good, if not better than many TV shows! As always, thanks for sharing!

We were burgled about 10 years ago while we were asleep in the house. No much was taken, but we haven't forgotten it. Glad it ended well for you. Personally, I think Ring cameras are a scam. I have started using the AI person detection that's built-in to my Reolink cameras and it's surprisingly accurate once you tune the sensitivity to it's location.

When I arm Alarmo as "Away" it will run a fake routine with my lights and TV, e.g. turn the living room on, then the bedroom.

Reolink sponsor is needed! With Frigate or Blue Iris

Vibration sensors on windows and doors. If they are jiggling the door knob a good sensor should pick that up. Which would be a good addition to cameras, in case they don't detect the intruder.

At the start I forgot what video I was watching. Very tense and very well told. Nicely edited. I've just bought some break beam sensors and are planning on connecting them to an esp32 and installing them on the driveway at waist height because we have cats and foxes around here.

Great video and a great reminder how important it is to secure your home in some way. I started using Frigate a couple months ago, and I love it. It takes some time to fine tune things and minimize false alerts. But once that's done, it's incredible. I constantly have squirrels and rabbits on my property and being able to only send me notifications if movement is specifically human or a car in the driveway really helps only notify me when something is worth taking a look at, eliminating that behavior to ignore notifications because they're nothing 90% of the time. Think you'll enjoy it and look forward to seeing the wild things you do with it.

I am late finding this channel, but damn your production value is top notch. Also, well done getting the 911 audio. In general, I really appreciate your conversational tone and the way you talk through the items you do (I just watched your hacked facebook account video) and how to do them. In regards to the problem at hand, I think in general most cameras have an alert fatigue issue, they are just too sensitive or reach too far by default. My neighborhood has an issue with kids taking things from cars that are unlocked. I think you can also your ideas to create "I am home" actions. Very smart. Keep up the good work dude and take your final form.

First of all your story telling is top shelf. Once again your B roll and whole production is fantastic. I just started down the path with frigate last week because my current NVR is lacking in a few ways. The legacy system does alert on motion but, any motion like sunlight shinning through the leave with some wind. I want to know if there are people or cars moving around where they shouldn’t be. I’m using frigate with a coral TPU and it works great with about 6ms inference speed. It integrates very nicely and with the features of frigate it will replace some of your workflows in node red. Because the workflows are already built in. The most negative thing I can say about frigate is that its very config file driven. Its yaml, but it would be nice if you could make changes with a GUI. The biggest thing I see as an issue is your cameras. I'll suggest that you start with one camera first and learn your way around the system. Not to hate on ring but throw those in the dust bin. What you are missing in a camera is 1) Better powered cameras and not use battery powered once. I understand the advantages, but there are also a down side to the cameras as you expressed $$. 2. The video quality and bandwidth available for battery powered cameras is not as good as wired. 3. You need cameras with a good and strong IR light so you can see in your yard without the intruder being able to see and see you seeing them. For me, I selected Amcrest/Dahua cameras. The 4MP camera is about $60 USD. The down side is they are wired so you may be limited to where you can install them if you don’t own your home. The point is pick the best camera you can get within your budget. I would suggest you get a test camera with built in IR light and set it up to see what you've been missing. Its crazy what you can see with IR light when its totally dark out to the human eye.

Your videos are seriously awesome! Please keep them coming; I absolutely love watching them. They’re such a source of inspiration for sprucing up my home!

I don't think putting the lock on the gate is a good idea because now, the person might jump the fence and therefore not trigger the alarm. One of the principle in cyber security is that you don't want just a wall (or series) of. You want corridors where you can detect intrusion and then walls to slow them down... My 2 cents of course and worth that much.

Wow - I love how much effort you put into creating your videos. This is nearly a thriller 😊👍🏻😎

Glad you're okay! Thanks for sharing this--a much-needed prompt for me to revisit my setup vis a vis security/intrusion detection. Frigate is great, but at least in my backyard, the person detection does have a fair number of false positives (the camera will occasionally think a stationary grill sitting on our deck or a toy sitting on the lawn is a person). Currently experimenting with using the Frigate person occupancy states being detected for more than 15 seconds as triggers, with the automation looping until they are all negative before it turns the perimeter lights back out. Hopefully that will avoid the random momentary false positives while still flagging real people. Also, second using the Alarmo integration for HA security, it's great.

Can you do a video that would show what all doesn't work if your internet is down? Most people seem to forget how dependent we are today on that internet connection.

We have yolink outdoor devices. Outdoor Motion sensors are great for us. They go a long distance. More than regular wifi

Welp you’ll be one of the fastest growing RU-vidrs shortly. Insane video.

I have Wyze cams. I don't pay for their cloud stuff though. It's running into Home assistant/frigate, using a Google Coral TPU for super fast, and accurate local image recognition and recording. A dog walks by at night, no alert. A human walks by, and home assistant alerts me, regardless of my iPhone's silent settings. The time sensitive alerts with the HASS app are great. Also, Yes Frigate will take automation you can think of to the next level. I have it ran into a template sensor to help with room presence detection in my living room. It also sends me alerts if I've left empty cups or cans on my table lmao.

You are a FANTASTIC storyteller!

Alarmo is a great home assistant integration that let's you create custom triggers and alarms in custom modes

My smart home defense is the flashlight on my shotgun XD

I've fixed this as well. But with multiple diy mmwave sensors, combined with zigbee sensors and multiple cameras with motion sensors. If one is triggered, our bedroom tv will turn in with a video stream. If one is closer to the house, our lights will automatically turn on like if it seems I've caught him and coming to get him. Just to keep us safe. The videos are stored on a local server. The whole system works locally.

Hey "Deranged Stranger" was the name of my high school grunge band!

Great Video, I'm gad things turned out well for you and your family. I was thinking that puting a combination lock on you gate would encourage an intruder to climb over the fence/gate and in doing so defeat the door sensor alert. I would make sure that if your rely on the internet for any of your home security that you check that it would not be easy for an intruder to cut your connection. This is a good reason to have local rather than cloud dependent smart home setups.

I have been considering beam detectors for this type of scenario. They will only be triggered by humans being somewhere they shouldn't be. No lengthy coding, no false alarms.

Scary for sure. Definitely have to echo a few comments here and recommend you ditch ring cameras. Reolink make some great cameras that actually work much better and have local recording for free via many options. The cost of that floodlight cam and ring solar panel was more than reolink equivalent that also includes pan and tilt and the ability to not only identify the person but follow them. Argus PT, trackmix, Argus 3 pro, or e1 outdoor are all great solar options. But frigate and a Google coral are definitely the way to go from what I've see. And a mains powered cera be it PoE or otherwise would be a definite must to avoid the potential of a power issue. I'm currently working on setting up my reolink cameras person alert feature trigger to turn on the corresponding outdoor light in that area. And HA natively supports reolink cameras now.

You have one of mmwave motion sensors... would that be able to give you more accurate "location" awareness? I am sure that if it's raining it'll say there's 10000 people outside, but ... who knows. You might know how _many_ people are outside. Where they are and then use that ... to trigger several lasers pointed to their heads.

I think it’s insane that you need a subscription for any kind of recording with your camera like I wouldn’t mind if they would 1. Give you a limited amount of time to mark your records as important with some kind of limit to the amount of saved ones you can have and any not marked as important would delete after the short period of time! Or 2. Some way to allow on site recording to your own storage even if it’s not something your average user my do! I mean don’t purposefully obfuscate it but it doesn’t necessarily need to be plug and play But it’s insane that they can put such a major feature of a camera recording behind a monthly paywall especially for something that can prevent crimes!!!!!!

That must have been scary! I use frigate and cameras for something similar and started after someone stole a large reindeer inflatable from my yard a few years ago. I leave the automations year round though and its helped. Overnight when a person is detected in a zone in my yard lights will start to come on inside the house. They turn on a few seconds apart so that it appears that someone is moving through the house. If someone comes to the door, the front porch light flashes and LED strip lights turn on red/blue through WLED. I get a notification on my phone with a button to sound a siren outside. I have luckily only tested this and it hasn't needed to work. I also have a similar automation running for if a car is detected in front of my house overnight. If it is there for more than 5 seconds lights start coming on in the house. This helped once when a car pulled up to my neighbors truck across the street with intentions to steal the cats off of the exhaust (they hit other trucks that night in the neighborhood). They were in the zone enough that it triggered this automation. Someone had gotten out of the car and someone else looked at my house when the lights were turning on and called the person back in the car and they drove off.

That's a scary situation. Security is one of my big areas I want my home automation to cover. I have a long way to go, but I agree - no one should be wandering around my yard, or worse, inside my house, without me knowing. I've got wired security cameras using Blue Iris, and CodeProject AI to determine if the movement was a person and cut out things like shadows or the wind moving the bushes. I'm adding ESP Home devices with PIR's and mmWave devices to detect movement and presence in my rooms of the house. And yes, it is a fine balance of what to do at night. No one wants to get woken up all the time with false alarms. I've got deer and all kinds of animals wandering around at night. But no one wants people wandering around trying to get in the house and you are asleep and clueless to that. I agree about outside lights, they just helps the bad guys see what they are doing. I'll keep working on perfecting my system for security. As usual, great video with great ideas.

Awesome video as always! How are you getting the Ring doorbell and camera pictures sent to Telegram in Node-Red? Are you using one of the Ring palettes? If so, which one?

Still less than 9k subs… you deserve way more !

Yeah, you are very intimidating, you big old teddy bear. Good start for safety. That is the type of reason I carry a gun as last resort. Too many CRAZIES out there.

poe cameras + frigate nvr + coral tpu.

Absolutely frigate with HASS is the go. But get rid of ring, use descent cams. I had ring and yes it crys wolf and slow. I use hikvision colorvu. Night footage looks like day and in 4k. No subscription needed.

Do you live in a rental?? I'll send you 1 of my retired POE cams. Paired with either frigate or a blueiris server, it's leaps and bounds better than Ring.

Well done @technithusiast I like your style