
Show HN: HTML5 webcam pics to email with motion detection - pixeltwenty
https://pixeltwenty.com/picstoemail.html
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brandon272
Somewhat unrelated, but on the topic of detecting motion, I have a Nest
Outdoor camera and subscribe to Nest's "Nest Aware" service for $10 a month,
which enables me to save a week's worth of video and also is supposed to give
me "intelligent" alerts when motion is detected, and is supposed to use
"advanced cloud algorithms" to let me know when important things are happening
and whether or not I should be notified.

I'm honestly really disappointed in it because 99% of the alerts I get from
this camera are false alarms. The most frequent offender is light from passing
vehicles. It is worse when it has rained and the reflection of headlights can
be seen in the "zone" I have set up to send me alerts. You would think Google
would be able to drop false alarms down to nothing for the common things like
everyday street traffic, but apparently not.

They also have a weird rule where you can only get 1 notification within a 30
minute window. So if I take my garbage outside and the camera sees me, it will
send an alert. If an axe murderer comes onto the property 20 minutes after
that, the camera won't alert me.

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mholmes680
I've never been more disappointed in a product than the Nest Cam. Nest's lack
of panning and zooming, and a subscription service PER camera? False alarms so
frequent that i ignore them now, which defeats the purpose? I don't know if it
was marketed as a security device or i just assumed it would be, but its far
from a good security device in my case.

I used to have 3 Foscam's (now rebranded to Amcrest) recording to a local
central server, backing up to an offsite location, and tried with some success
to get imageMagick to weed out any duplicate false alarms. Thought the NestCam
would be make things more friction-less, but its worse. (I lost the old setup
but am probably going back to the new ones soon).

OP: to get around your notification rule, you can try IFTTT. I've had various
levels of success: it always seems to work fine for a week, and then something
changes (android update? ifttt update? nest app update?) and it breaks until i
notice it again.

~~~
brandon272
Thanks for the IFTTT recommendation, I'll have a look. This is my first
camera. My first instinct was to go with something like a Foscam/Amcrest on a
more "DIY" route but the thought of having something plug-and-play was nice
too, especially with Nest playing up their "we use A.I. and algorithms to make
this all work perfectly" angle, which I feel misled by.

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pixeltwenty
The motion detection takes place in the browser with JavaScript which analyzes
and quantifies RGB value differences. HTML5 takes care of the camera. An email
server is still required - HTML5 doesn't cover that of course. This works with
up-to-date Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera browsers on Windows, Mac, and
Android (the OS specific browsers running as applicable on various platforms).
I am currently aware of just Safari and iOS on iPhone/iPad not working - the
camera view shows all black and I have not yet attempted to solve.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
What if js could handle sending email via Mailgun, Sendgrid etc.? Then it
could be self-hosted (though you may not want it to be, of course).

~~~
pixeltwenty
Thanks for the ideas. One thing I have wrestled with in the past is how to
prevent exposing the third party site email credentials (credentials the page
would utilize for accessing Sendgrid, etc.) if the emailing code were hosted
in the local and observable JavaScript. With the current server solution, at a
minimum the browser and CORS enforcement take care of attempted cross domain
access ... which is probably just slightly better than nothing at all.

~~~
j_s
Let end users provide their own third party site email credentials.

~~~
pixeltwenty
I like that idea. It could be an alternative, an additional option.

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seanalltogether
Be careful with exposing an open sendmail feature on your website. If it gets
highjacked to send spam your domain could get blacklisted by google, yahoo,
etc.

~~~
bhhaskin
Sendmail is pretty much blocked everywhere anyways.

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phyrex
This is great! Any chance you can open source this?

