Stop Relying on Big Tech for Your Home Security
Stop letting cloud cams spy on you — build this DIY local viewer with an ESP32 to keep your home security footage private and 100% offline.
With data breaches making headlines so frequently, it’s hard for many people to fully trust cloud-based services with their most sensitive information. At the same time, home security camera systems offer a strong sense of reassurance when no one is around. In practice, that convenience often outweighs privacy worries, leaving people to rely on trust and hope that nothing goes wrong.
However, if you have some skills in electronics, there is another option. As Redditor PDConAutoTrack recently demonstrated, you can build your own security camera system that keeps data local and private. Unless you’re incredibly talented in product design, manufacturing, electronics, and software engineering, it’s not going to look or feel as nice as a commercial device — but at least it will get the job done and you know it’s not spying on you!
PDConAutoTrack’s build is an offline doorbell camera viewer. It is powered by an ESP32-S3 Super Mini Development Board and a cheap module containing a 2.0-inch TFT LCD display, a rotary encoder, and a push button. A makeshift circuit board was constructed on perfboard, and a barebones stand was formed from 2mm copper tubing. Aside from that, all you need is a little elbow grease.
During normal operation, the display is programmed to show a clock. A doorbell camera is integrated with Home Assistant, and when motion is detected, it snaps a picture. Another Home Assistant integration is used to display the picture on the custom viewer hardware, which is made possible by the ESP32-S3’s native Wi-Fi connectivity.
PDConAutoTrack has multiple security cameras, and the rotary encoder on the viewer can be used to switch between them. The push button manually refreshes the display with the latest image captured for the selected camera.
The system can only display still images — no video. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles aside from that, either. But at least you know that you are the only one who can view the images captured by your camera. That seems like a pretty good trade-off to me.
If you’d like to build your own, there’s plenty more information in the GitHub repository.