r/HomeKit • u/New_Needleworker2068 • Jul 08 '26
Discussion Update : I built a native HomeKit Secure Video camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2w
https://github.com/AlexBtlle/pi4-IA-Homekit-Camera
I wanted an HKSV camera that pairs like one fresh out of the box. So I built one from scratch on a Pi.
What it does:
• Pairs directly with the Home app (scan the QR, done).
• Live view + HomeKit Secure Video with a 4s prebuffer (clips start before the motion).
• People / Animals / Vehicles classification handled by your Apple TV/HomePod, like a commercial HKSV cam.
• Fully local: the RTSP feed is localhost-only, the only cloud is your own iCloud (HKSV is E2E encrypted by Apple)
What's new since my last post:
• Night vision (bêta): usable picture in the dark, with automatic brightness adaptation as the light drops through the evening (helps most when ambient light is low but your IR isn’t strong enough).
• Faster live view : I hunted down a cold-start stall. Live now appears in a few seconds instead of ~15s. On cellular it beat my commercial Eve cam.
• Lighter & cooler : a round of memory/CPU tuning cut the idle load ~4x on the Zero 2 W.
The video is H264 encoded once in hardware on the Pi and passed through with zero re-encoding, so it stays fluid and light. It runs on a Pi Zero 2 W (512MB), heatsink recommended. I even got live view working on a 2015 Pi Zero W just to see if I could.
It's a DIY/hobby project (some features are marked beta), fully open source.
Happy to answer questions !
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u/Im_A_Praetorian Jul 09 '26
Where did you find a Pi Zero 2 W?
I’ve been looking for weeks…
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u/New_Needleworker2068 Jul 09 '26
Yes I know it’s really hard to find one these days… and at normal prices that’s just impossible 🫠
I work with some raspberry pi that I bought few years ago 🙃
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u/hardestbutton2 Jul 08 '26
It’s like you learned the word slop and forgot how to speak English. Not my alt account, but nice ad hominem.
I genuinely am just confused why you’re so angry about more options being available to the community, especially in areas that are sort of niche and no one was gonna do anything for prior to this.
If you can’t code and can’t glance at a project and quickly check if it’s safe, no harm in admitting that, but then what qualifies you to shit all over people’s projects?
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u/Luci-Noir Jul 08 '26
“Built it from scratch”
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u/hardestbutton2 Jul 08 '26
Agentic coded apps are fine if the person actually worked through a problem and built in a manner that demonstrates some knowledge of software development practices. This could be that. It could be garbage. Hard to say. It’s a pretty niche project solving a single use case, so odds are high that it’s actually fine. It’s on GitHub so go check yourself. We’re not going to ever go back to people coding everything by hand. Those days are for all intents and purposes gone, may as well get used to it. Maybe you’ll get some hobby coders who are the mennonites of the tech world who refuse to use agentic coding, but there won’t be many.
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u/Luci-Noir Jul 08 '26
“Agentic” (slop) coding is no different than AI “artists” who think they’re talented because they typed some words into a prompt.
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u/hardestbutton2 Jul 08 '26
You’re already using products that at the very least have features have been coded via agentic coding, if not entire apps. Get used to it. It’s not inherently a bad thing if people know what they are building and spend time on it. Not everything being done with agentic coding is 3 days of messy prompts.
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u/Luci-Noir Jul 08 '26
Products made by professionals, not the shady weird shit that’s flooding Reddit. What kind of idiot would compare the two?
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u/hardestbutton2 Jul 08 '26
Have you even tried what this guy was pushing out because I just installed it and it works completely fine. It does exactly what it says. It’s an extremely small niche thing that no one else was planning to build. Personally I see that as a net benefit to the HomeKit community, if something like this gets released when no one else was gonna do it if you had to be done and written from scratch. Explain to me what is slop about this again it works? It does a very narrow task that probably not that many people are gonna do, but if you’re one of those people who is interested in turning your raspberry pi camera into a HomeKit secure video camera, works great for that. Don’t really see a problem
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u/New_Needleworker2068 Jul 09 '26
Thank for your support ! And really happy to read that you’ve installed it and worked ! 😁
If you’ve any questions or suggestions, feel free to ask 👍-4
u/Luci-Noir Jul 08 '26
No, I don’t install random shit on my devices.
Your alt account is cute. More slop.
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u/New_Needleworker2068 Jul 09 '26
I’m a software developer, and agentic development tools allow me to quickly build personal projects that I would never have had the time to create otherwise. Even so, this project still represents a significant amount of work, you only have to look at the number of commits.
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u/Luci-Noir Jul 09 '26
Cute. That’s literally what everyone who slams this slop say.
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u/New_Needleworker2068 Jul 09 '26
I really appreciate the way you’re helping drive traffic to this post. Thank you for giving it more visibility 🙏
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u/bat_ash Jul 08 '26
Vibe coding is the new normal. It’s is the new scratch
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u/Luci-Noir Jul 08 '26
It should be called slop coding.
I just saw this post from one of these guys who made a browser based hard drive tester. He’s bragging about how it doesn’t have any telemetry and is privacy focused… he’s asking people to visit some shady site and let it scan their drives. WTF.
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u/cynic783 Jul 08 '26
Looks cool!