Hi all.
I have a Synology NAS running Surveillance Station and some HIKvision cameras for home security. I also have a couple of spare camera licenses.
From a little research it looks like it’s possible to add a Raspberry Pi + Camera to the Synology SS but the references I found were some years old.
Does anyone have any recent experience with this?
I run a low frame rate of 1 second as this is all I need to capture faces and it saves on NAS drive space and network resources.
Bonus question: Would an Arducam (or alike) + Pico do the trick? I’d propose to use an ethernet hat on the Pico to hard wired the “pico camera” to my home network.
Cheers.
Hey @Mark285907,
It’s quite surprising that there isn’t more info on this, given how popular Synology has been in the past few years.
Unfortunately, I can’t offer any direct experience with the Synology side of things. However, provided your NAS is still running the base DSM OS, you might be able to take a pretty similar route to those used for other Linux-based NAS setups (like OMV or FreeNAS. Though I was under the impression that the Synology products are a little more locked down).
Hopefully another forum user will have direct experience and can help out.
Regarding your bonus question, I know it’s a very popular project to make a security camera or webcam with either a Pico or a Pi Zero. You could definitely hook-up an ethernet HAT + camera module and it’d be ready to go. You also might be able to go the wireless route, but it might be more effort than it’s worth.
Camera choice would be limited for the pico, however. Most of the camera modules we have on offer connect to an onboard ribbon cable port, which the Pico doesn’t have. Arducam does offer the Mega 3MP Camera and the Mega 5MP Camera, which can easily break out into individual SPI pins.
Hope this helps!
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Stupid question time!
If I were to do this with a Pico 2 and W5100S Ethernet HAT, what do I need to get to the Pico pins for the SPI? The W5100S Ethernet HAT comes with headers that the Pico 2 H plugs into. I assume I need a protoboard or some other header to make the connections?
Just realised i put Pi instead of Pico in the title. Apologies.
I can see that a pico could take and store on a card, an image, but to offer up video to a pvr would it not need a webserver and buffer on board?
I assume a Pi can do this but not a Pico?
Hey @Mark285907,
Regarding the Pin conflicts, the Ethernet HAT has listings for which pins it actually uses. See below.
You would likely be able to set up the camera on the SPI1 line and the Ethernet on SPI0. As far as physical connection goes, I would consider using double-sided headers like these, rather than a protoboard. You would need to solder the pads on the Ethernet HAT anyway, so it’s not too much extra work.
Feasibility-wise, a Pi is absolutely able to do it, and I would think a Pico could do it, but with a lot more finangling. In my eyes, it should be very possible to use the Ethernet HAT to transmit realistically any data to a LAN or WAN that has your PVR connected to it. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually done that, so it’s pure conjecture from my end.
The classic DIY security camera is often made with a Pi Zero or Zero 2 W. It has enough processing power to perform any task you might need, and also benefits from a wider array of libraries/additional code for this sort of thing than the Pico does.
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Thanks Zach.
After some more research I dropped the idea of the Pico as I want this to be a properly functioning CCTV camera with a reasonable frame rate and resolution. I’ve ordered a Pi zero 2 W, a CAMERA MODULE 3 WIDE and other bits.
Cheers.
Hey @Mark285907,
Sounds good, let us know how the project goes!
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