We show the CCTV cameras we are using as Hog Cams below:
ieGeek Security Camera Outdoor with 25m Night Vision ← paid links on this page
Some more images below from our Hog Cams:
Before opting to install Synology Surveillance Station on a couple of our storage Synology NAS’, we looked into utilising MotionEyes on a Raspberry Pi and on Pi Zeroes with camera modules attached.
We initially looked into MotionEyes as it is a project in the public domain, so no licencing fees, though Ian dismissed using Pi Zero’s with camera modules as they lacked sound and also couldn’t match the price / quality of commercial CCTV IP cameras. Having a RPi 3B or Rpi 4B as a file-server was also dismissed for a number of reasons:
- Lack of Raspberry Pi’s available to buy at reasonable prices
- When cases, SD cards, power supplies and storage devices if using USB 3.0 (require a powered hub)
If you only consider the cost of the file-server and a hard drive to store the captured video on it, then the Pi option starts to get close to the cost of a basic Synology NAS, here is an example at Amazon note that this doesn’t include a Hard Drive. Setting up a Synology NAS is also a lot easier than configuring an RPi to do the same tasks.
We have a number of Synology NAS (Network Array Storage) devices, our main property monitoring CCTV system runs on a DS116 unit. Each Synology NAS has 2 free licences
For Ian and Sandra, as they already had some NAS’ that weren’t already running CCTV, it became a very simple decision for a few cameras.
A major flaw with these CCTV cameras, unless you have a reasonably high specification router, is that they seem to want to “phone home” with an unbelievable frequency