Before embarking on my privacy journey, I setup a very basic IoT of all Amazon products - FireTV, several Alexa Echos, and a Ring doorbell camera. Now I am desperately trying to find an affordable replacement for them. I am planning on buying the Nvidia Shield TV to replace FireTV and open to suggestions, but I’m unsure about the others. FOSS would be great too, though I don’t think I can go full hog and build my own devices.
The only FOSS, privacy-centric Echo alternative I know of is the NeonAI Mycroft Mark II, but this is $400 per unit. Since this would be a fortune just to put one in each room, I’m wondering if anything else more reasonable has emerged yet.
As for the Ring doorbell, I’ve seen various recommendations for Arlo, Eufy, and Ubiquiti/Unify, but I can’t tell if any are actually much better than Ring in terms of privacy and security, especially for the steeper prices. Would love to know the community favorites.
Thanks in advance for the help!
Start looking into home assistant. It can accomplish most of the things you want.
Yeah I have been and am super excited to get into it once I upgrade my homeserver, but my issue is the hardware devices. The ease of speaking into the void to set timers and get news, the intuitive Ring camera that automatically sends push notifications on movement detection. Idk how to replace these.
Home assistant has been working hard on voice assistants. I haven’t set one up yet, but I believe it’s pretty simple to get going. You may need to get comfy with esp32.
It’s probably not as intuitive, but Frigate NVR is way more powerful and, when combined with HA, a very capable platform to get notifications for much more than just motion detection (very powerful object recognition, and now a ridiculously comprehensive sound detection engine as well, as of 0.13.0 beta 1, are some examples). Frigate + HA can more than likely do anything you need from a security camera, and far more than you have ever considered needing.
Maybe take a look at cheap ESP mics such as the one mentioned here, being cheap so you can have many scattered around is their whole thing. Sound quality isn’t great but if it’s mostly for input it can work. Not sure if replicating the Ring notifications is feasible.
This is the way.
Newer Siri devices don’t need internet to do home automation. It’s where I’m thinking of moving.
I’ve used an Arlo camera system and it did NOT play well with homeassistant. Requiring an account, certain features behind paywall, I really can’t recommend it. Maybe things have changed (or maybe some of it was user error) though.
Is Nvidia’s Shield TV any more private/secure than the FireTV? not a dig at OP, just curious because I haven’t heard much about it.
Tbh I’m not sure out of the box. But I’d like to avoid Amazon as much as possible and I have to assume tinkering around and disabling telemetry and using a VPN etc. will be easier on the Shield.
Why not just get a NUC and run Kodi on it?
