I’ve had this dream for years of building a security command center that doesn’t care who manufactured the equipment. If I see a camera, doorbell, smart lock, or garage door gadget I like, I want to buy it, bring it home, and add it to my system. No worrying about whether it’s compatible with some manufacturer’s carefully guarded ecosystem. And I’d really rather not pay a monthly subscription to use hardware I already bought. You’d think that would be a fairly reasonable request.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This summer I was looking at Verkada’s security management system and really liked the way they brought everything together. Cameras, recordings, events, alerts, all managed from one dashboard. Beautiful idea. Except I wanted that kind of management experience without having to buy everybody’s matching equipment. I’ve already got Reolink doorbells, a Bauhn camera, myQ garage equipment, Kevo locks, and assorted other electronic troublemakers. I’m not replacing perfectly good hardware just to make the logos match. So I started building Vertderferk<\/strong>, my own brand-agnostic security command center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The secret sauce is what I call brand-loyal translator modules. Each module understands a particular manufacturer’s equipment or connection method and translates it into something Vertderferk can use. RTSP, ONVIF, Tuya, proprietary APIs, whatever gets the job done. The command center shouldn’t care whether the video came from a $30 camera or a $300 camera. It just needs the video. Eventually the same philosophy will apply to locks, garage doors, sensors, and anything else I decide needs to join the party. Buy what you like, add it to the system, and let the translators sort out the family disagreements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Naturally, my first camera decided to make things interesting. Betsy Cam, a Bauhn camera, turned out to be Tuya underneath. The Tuya app worked, but getting the developer platform to cooperate was another story. I found an existing open-source project called tuya-rtsp-bridge, then had Beam AI build an integration module that worked with it. We took the scenic route around the barn, including a little Tuya developer-platform impersonation, but eventually got RTSP video flowing. Beam also built a separate direct Tuya RTSP module. So now we’ve got two ways to approach those cameras, plus the official Tuya developer platform and a burner Android phone waiting in the wings for particularly stubborn proprietary apps. Sometimes getting technology to cooperate requires a little creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then there’s the subscription situation. I’m not a big fan. Buy a doorbell, pay to save recordings. Buy a camera, pay to recognize a person. Buy another camera, congratulations, another monthly bill. Pretty soon your house needs its own accounting department. Vertderferk is intended to store recordings locally, run AI detection on my own hardware, and let me decide how long to keep things. I’ve already got an Ollama server running local AI models, so why pay somebody else to tell me there’s a dog in my driveway? Some proprietary services may still require subscriptions, but I’m going to avoid them wherever practical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right now Vertderferk is taking shape on an old HP Slimline running PHP, MariaDB, and Apache, with heavier AI work handled elsewhere on my network. Betsy Cam is streaming, the translator architecture is coming together, and the Reolink doorbells and myQ equipment are waiting their turn. I don’t expect every device on the planet to cooperate, but I intend to give them all a fighting chance. The whole idea is simple: I want to own my security equipment, choose my own hardware, and manage everything from one place without renting its functionality back from the manufacturers.<\/strong> One camera down, a whole junk drawer of gadgets to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve had this dream for years of building a security command center that doesn’t care who manufactured the equipment. If I see a camera, doorbell, smart lock, or garage door gadget I like, I want to buy it, bring it home, and add it to my system. No worrying about whether it’s compatible with some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glencoulson.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}