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
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.
Yeah, free, open source is fun, but we should also just support companies that have good ethics and want to make enough money to earn a living and keep making good products that respect people.
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.
You do you, but I’m holding out for it… and only in fully automated, luxury, gay form.
You have my blessing.
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
I used to think Reddit users were too negative. Then I joined Lemmy.
Loud people are negative. Doesn’t matter the website.
A “privacy product” inherently involves a lot of trust. When the creators are academics with little to no professional footprint, you need to assess things based on what information they do provide you. Whether that be code (yay open source) or customer interactions (forum posts).
I know we all yearn for the days of “Use Google. Their motto is ‘do no evil’ so you know they are our friends!”. But… that was a much stupider time.
Like, even if you suckle at the teat of Saint Capitalism, you should at least want a good product. And… this looks like enthusiast code with minimal maintainability but a heavy emphasis on marketing.
Agreed, however the number of positive comments from one-day old accounts is suspect for me.
This is a security product where trust is paramount, so I get a bit itchy about anything like that, but I could be overreacting.
I can’t speak to the account thing, I checked the guy you replied to and it seems like his is 3 months old, not yesterday.
I wanted to mention that we plan to get a third-party security audit by a reputable firm sometime this summer.
Yea I edited that part because Lemmy was not showing me the right info, but there are more below, which is… Odd.
In any event, great to hear about an SA, and I have starred the project to check it out.
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free. What a blessed utopia that must be.
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.
🤔
I guess its just us in here then, among these AI bots.
Nice! I’ve been wondering lately if there was an open-source solution for this
iirc pine64 so has a camera in their store
Yes they do! Theirs is an IP camera.
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?
Finally, open source surveillance
Surveilance cameras aren’t necessarily a bad thing
Sousveillance
Now hack ring cameras so existing installed cams can connect to your own hosted network.
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?
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.
The iOS app is not available in my country in Europe.
Is there a way to integrate this into Home Assistant as well?
We’re exploring Home Assistant integrations for the next update.
Unfortunately, iOS does not allow us to publish in 20ish countries, which are all Europe-based. This is due to certain legislation.
What exactly is preventing you from publishing the App in Europe? There‘s all kinds of similar apps on the Appstore already.
For some reason, they did not accept our documentation yet. Therefore, we are not allowed to publish there unfortunately on iOS.
How much does it cost?
And add F-Droid
Thanks for your interest!
We tried adding it on f-droid, but it seems like they have a backlog of projects to add. They haven’t gotten to test it out yet it seems.
This is why we now support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play. It can be hooked up to our mobile_client repository releases to pull the universal APK.
We do not charge anything for DIY. For our future offering, we have some information on the main page (secluso.com) of our site in section 4, along with what you would get.
Great, can you make some promotion video.
With maybe camera feed at night and at day.
Because from information on your site I wonder how looks camera feed at night and at day.
Yes, we are working on such a video. I will follow up here once that is ready.
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.
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.
Fair enough. I’ll still say that is bad engineering but acknowledge that starts to get into the realm of taste.
Either way, in the past 24 days you have MR commits on 8 of those and April looks similar. The code is generally poorly documented and skimming the closed MRs, I am not seeing much discussion or review in any of them. So I stand by
At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.
Fair points. I appreciate the constructive criticism! Moving forward, we will improve on our documentation. In terms of review, we always review and test each other’s code (sometimes via other mode of communication), even if there weren’t any comments on the pull request.
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.
What temp ranges are these good for? Can it run off solar+battery?
How are you protecting against supply chain attacks?
Hi Brkdncr, thanks for the question!
We honestly do not have a concrete answer for the temp ranges. We’ve done some testing and made sure they stay under 150F in the 3D case shown in the picture.
We do not currently directly support solar/battery usage. You can probably DIY something together though!
For Software: We’ve started to thoroughly go through our dependencies by using the Cargo Vet tool, in addition to looking for unmaintained dependencies, dependencies that we can replace with a few lines of code, etc.
For Hardware: We’re using trusted hardware providers like Raspberry Pi to try to mitigate this.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
But does it do frigate? Can it be used applessly?
Hi muusemuuse, this is meant to be a drop-in replacement to WiFi cameras (and therefore accessible to non-technical users, easy to use and easy to setup). Frigate is great, and we definitely recommend it if you have the time to get it up and running.
In regard to being able to use it without the app, that’s not possible unfortunately due to the end-to-end encryption that takes place. An application needs to be on the other end to decrypt things.
Our app is available through Obtainium if you do not like the Play Store. It is also reproducible, so you can verify to make sure it was derived from our mobile_client codebase.
Are only VPS relay’s supported at the moment? Presumably so the feed is accessible over the web?
I get that the project seems to be going for replicating a ring/wyze/etc style experience but being able to self-host a relay somehow seems like a logical addition. Would probably have to disavow connecting outside of the home network and leave that the responsibility of the user.
If you’re technical, you could probably put together a locally hosted server on your Linux machine and use Tailscale or something like that, it should work fine with the code as-is. Our server binary is in the runtime-binaries zip in the core GitHub release.
Fair enough. Really appreciate the work ya’ll have put into this, definitely going to have to mess around with it. Just brought it up because of the community this is in.
I would imagine most in this community would opt to use Tailscale or even Headscale rather than relying on a VPS.
I do find it funny how your post on Reddit only got a few upvotes yet here it gets a bunch. Really goes to show you the difference in attitude in each community.
It should not be too difficult to set that up with Tailscale. There’s no advanced configuration or anything of the sort. Download runtime binaries -> unzip -> generate a user credentials QR using the config tool -> put the user_credentials file in the user_credentials folder next to the server binary -> setup a service for the server on the machine you intend to use.
Our post was taken down on Reddit a couple hours after it was made due to a misunderstanding. The moderators re-instated it a day or two later.
I think the point is to be easier than frigate. Eg a full image like home assistant, not needing to fiddle with docker.
Podman quadlets or I’m out
Very cool!
okay this is actually a cool project to work on
Why not just Thingino?
Thingino looks like a great option for changing firmware of IP cameras to be open-source, and is useful in local NVR-like setups! Our goal is to different: provide an end-to-end encrypted, easy-to-configure and easy-to-use WiFi camera.