Sounds like a no-brainer to implement an open source solution for baby monitoring, such a universal need. Tech wise, RTSP feed from a camera + motion detection model + homeassistant (maybe) and bob's your uncle?
But I guess the ones who need this the most (parents) also lack the time to do anything about it.
The trouble with hacking these things together yourself is you need to be sure they're reliable.
Can you be certain that at 3:46 in the morning that you'll be able to pull this up on your phone from bed and it will just work? What about if you are out and left the kid with a babysitter - can you reliably access from outside?
I went through quite a few Amazon cheapo RRSP cameras and they would invariably just stop working randomly in the most scary way for a baby monitor: they'd freeze frame and there is no way to know if the baby is just still or if the feed has hung. I thought about perhaps rigging up some infrared flashing LED or something but this was all a lot of effort and time and energy that as a new parent I just didn't have.
In the end I got some Nest cameras and have had zero downtime and they just work at home and when out and about. Say what you want about Google but I probably trust them more than most places to not let the cameras get hacked trivially.
> Can you be certain that at 3:46 in the morning that you'll be able to pull this up on your phone from bed and it will just work?
If not... I'm walking to the kids room to check. Which is not such an uncommon task that a slight risk of additional instances is a big deal.
> What about if you are out and left the kid with a babysitter - can you reliably access from outside.
If I left the kid with a babysitter it is because I uave sufficient level of trust in thr babysitter, and a baby monitor accessible from outside is a risk, not a benefit.
> Say what you want about Google but I probably trust them more than most places to not let the cameras get hacked trivially.
I trust a baby monitor that isn't exposed on a network more than one managed by Google.
> Can you be certain that at 3:46 in the morning that you'll be able to pull this up on your phone from bed and it will just work? What about if you are out and left the kid with a babysitter - can you reliably access from outside?
It needs to work and reliability matters, but isn’t mission critical, life or death.
It is possible to raise a child without a baby monitor.
The chance of a technical failure and an emergency both happening at the same time is not zero, but it's also pretty low. Most of what baby monitors do is provide peace of mind because most of the time everything will turn out to be fine.
Most people don't have the time or knowledge to set up a Linux box, much less an OSS baby monitor.
This is one category of problem that should be solved through legislation, but I doubt that should such laws be passed, that they would be actually enforced against bad actors.
Like most regulations, it'll be just another weapon to entrench existing players, and keep new entrants out of the market.
The way things should work: right-to-repair means not only schematics, BOMs, and source code; it also means documentation on network protocols, and the ability for the end-user to repoint any sort of cloud/smartphone connected device to another endpoint.
> This is one category of problem that should be solved through legislation, but I doubt that should such laws be passed, that they would be actually enforced against bad actors.
IANAL, but I would think this would be covered by existing false advertising laws, and maybe breach of contract. They advertised a product as coming with features x, y, and z; people paid for those features; and then the company unilaterally disabled those features. So now features x, y, and z no longer work on the product as advertised. I'd be surprised if we don't see class action lawsuits for this.
"Most people don't have the time or knowledge to set up a Linux box, much less an OSS baby monitor."
Luckily this granddad does. I also get deployed by daughter in law to deal with any safety critical stuff in their house eg stair gates and mounting TVs on the wall that will survive an acrobat practising a new routine. Ironically enough, her other half is a railway safety engineer.
Technology isn't the be all and end all. Whilst I can and have rigged up a baby monitor from a spare Riolink, a spare PoE switch, a VPN back to my home Zoneminder etc, it isn't actually required. Yes I do have a lot of spare stuff and grandad's cloud is acceptable.
As a parent of two small kids, I just did an old cell phone running tinycam + generic ip webcam (amcrest makes a bunch of good ones). The dedicated cell phone is mostly for nannies/babysitters, I just have tinycam installed on my own. The only downside is it only works on your local network, but if you really care about that you can setup a home VPN. That last one is beyond the capability of the average consumer though.
Perhaps Zoneminder [1][2] to knock out both baby monitoring and home security at the same time. I could see this being bundled in a RasPi and TailScale to handle at least a few cameras with some kind of simple wizard setup. Maybe if there was demand for it the people at TailScale [3] could make something like this?
Yeah, man, it repeats itself every few weeks for me
"OK, here's a half-assed SaaS that will do most of what I want for $10/month, or I can cobble together my own half-assed solution that will do everything I want for 'free' (~$1000's worth of my own time more than a few years of the SaaS) ... which to choose..."
I don't really trust external businesses to get streaming video of the inside of my house, and I don't trust them to monitor my kid. But am I going to do a better job in a weekend? Hmm...
But I guess the ones who need this the most (parents) also lack the time to do anything about it.