Hey everyone,

We've built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We also support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play.

We've put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.

The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We've also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole camera in the photo.

We've been working on this for almost 2 years now, and we look forward to we look forward to seeing what you all think! If you're interested in our efforts in general outside of DIY, our main website with our pre-built offering is here: click to see our website

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[–] 346 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (15 children)

These comments are why privacy products will always be behind. Why open-source is full of dead projects. These people are just trying to make a living off making privacy-focused products. And all the comments are like "They're a for-profit company? They had marketing material prepped to reply to people's comments?!".

The code is open-source, self-hostable, built using commodity hardware (raspi), and they're just trying to make it sustainable by providing an optional paid service. This is not the enemy.

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  • [+] 119 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)
  • [–] 38 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I want utopian space communism, but I'm not going to hold out for only that ideal when I can support alternatives that are better than the current system.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago

    Yeah supporting companies which makes privacy focused products, will create incentives for selling them to people which want them not just gaining additional profits from selling your data or showing you with ads

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    [–] 61 points 4 months ago (13 children)

    I’ve been looking for something like this. To be more accurate, I’ve been looking for something that works as a doorbell/intercom, that doesn’t rely on big tech in some way or other. But this seems like a promising start.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago* (11 children)

    I ended up going with Unifi (G4 Pro Doorbell) after my test-run with Reolink went... poorly. It's technically still 'big tech' but all the parts are on my property and my control, and (at least for the doorbell, that's all I've got so far) it works nearly-perfectly with HA (I can't get custom screen messages to stick when assigned through HA).

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That's what I've got. Doesn't require an app or account, and works with home assistant.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I bought a unit + 4tb surveillance drive, to replace a (what we thought was a) dying nest hardwired gen2 doorbell. I was excited - pulled it out of the box, 'oh, it has an AC brick too! I can set it up and make sure it works before we install it'

    Prepped the camera, prepped the nas to ingest the feed and drives, setup the non-proprietary stream (the acronym/letters escape me), all on the AC plug... And the feed, from the cam to the reolink app absolutely ground to a halt. I'm talking like, after 5 minutes of uptime, the feed was 60+ seconds behind. Absolutely wild. I restarted the app, phone, doorbell, no fix. I turned off the open-source (?) feed, going with only reolink's proprietary stream. Better, but after 10 minutes it was still 30+ seconds behind. Reset the doorbell, set it up again, no change...

    So either I got a defective/malfunctioning doorbell, a bad AC plug (but wouldn't it just die if it was pulling too much power...?), the AC plug isn't rated for anything more than very intital setup (I saw nothing about that in the instructions, and why would you do that...) or that is 'working as intended' which, why even bother if that is true.

    B&H accepted both doorbell and drive, opened, no questions asked. Was very excited and it genuinely ruined my day. :(

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    [–] 38 points 4 months ago

    I like what this project is trying to do, self hosted security cameras need to be more accessible to get people to stop using corporate spyware.

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  • [–] 24 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    The poster’s account is under 1 day old. There are multiple brand new accounts interacting with this post, too.

    And one of them is replying with positive sentiment.

    But the one calling it sus is also 5 days old, and making good points.

    🤔

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  • [–] [B] 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    HA Home Assistant automation software
    ~ High Availability
    IP Internet Protocol
    MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV)
    PoE Power over Ethernet
    SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
    Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand
    VPN Virtual Private Network
    VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

    [Thread #312 for this comm, first seen 24th May 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    From a quick glance at the repo?

    The commits generally come hot and heavy. Going back to the earlier 2025 commits and the messages mostly look like what you would expect from folk raw dogging main. Arrdalan in particular looks "real"-ish. Whereas jkaczman is already showing signs of the kinds of commit messages that claude et al generate, but those ARE based off certain style guides.

    Roll up to 2026 and I can see 11 commits on May 17 alone, they all look like claude messages, some are outright just arbitrarily changing magic hashes, and there are little to no comments.

    Not gonna fully call this ai slop but, it is REAL flipping sus as it were. At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.

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  • [–] [S] 28 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    Those 11 commits were from a rebase-and-merge PR, which changes the date from the original commit. Notice how there's a week gap between those and the prior commits on the main branch.

    The only thing AI is used on in this project is strictly for user interface work (our website, the front-end for the mobile app, the front-end for the deploy tool). We carefully vet anything like that.

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Use at your own risk.

    What an amazing conclusion, and the best part is, no matter what you've been waffling about before - it's always right. Can we stop calling random things AI slop and telling to be careful bEcAuSe iTs Ai sLoP, and go back to being cautious until something has been reviewed properly? Being careful with random stuff from GitHub you install and run in your private network?

    Your whole comment may have been AI slop as well. "From a quick glance at the repo", you should be careful! Thanks, Sherlock.

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  • [+] 10 points 4 months ago
    [–] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Can I have the video pushed to a self hosted server (eg NAS or proxmox VM) and just have my android be a client of that server?

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    [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    Now hack ring cameras so existing installed cams can connect to your own hosted network.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    Amazing work guys! Looks very promising. If I needed cameras I would use this.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    This is interesting. Can you give me a ballpark on your hardware cost for an 8 camera system? What does integration for NAS look like?

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Very nice. I'm desperately trying to get rid of my Ring cameras. This looks like a viable option.

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    [–] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Finally, open source surveillance

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    [–] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Nice! I've been wondering lately if there was an open-source solution for this

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    [–] 7 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Why a pi zero I've seen something like this done with an esp32 and a pi pico pi zero seems like putting an nvidia 1080 in your nes emu machine

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  • [–] [S] 23 points 4 months ago*

    We like the Pi because:

    • It has a hardware-accelerated H.264 encoder (Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU). This allows video encoding to be off-loaded off the CPU.
    • The extra compute allows us to do be able to do higher frame-rates and video quality than an ESP32 is capable of
    • We made our motion detection for events more accurate through offering the option of human/pet/vehicle detection, which I don't think ESP32 would be capable of (at least not in terms of the level of accuracy we currently achieve).
    • I haven't researched this, but I'm not sure if an ESP32 could handle the end-to-end encryption computation, unless it has a co-processor for it
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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Secluso is developed by Secluso, Inc. and co-founded by:

    Ardalan Amiri Sani, a UC Irvine professor with expertise in computer security and privacy

    John Kaczman, an open source and privacy enthusiast with experience in automation, systems, and AI.

    ~70% Rust. Are they all Rust programmers? How much of this app was generated through LLMs?

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 4 months ago

    The only thing AI is used on in this project is strictly for user interface work (our website, the front-end for the mobile app, the front-end for the deploy tool). We carefully vet anything like that.

    I think you may have misinterpreted my "automations, systems, and AI" (you put it in bold), that is intended to show my experience in machine learning (example: I spent 4 months in a lab helping improve the accuracy of wearable ECG abnormality detection). I do not rely on LLMs.

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