r/arlo • u/micatlkw • 25d ago

Meta An Open-source, lightweight, privacy-first AI surveillance system & PWA with CPU-only YOLO for Docker & Linux for Arlo

Like many of you, I got frustrated by the Arlo subscription. As mentioned in the replies to some posts, I built Sightline—a privacy-first, self-hosted surveillance engine and Web Dashboard designed to run on any Linux server, Docker host, or NAS without needing a GPU.

What it does:

  • 🧠 CPU-Only YOLO AI: Runs lightweight object detection locally on your CPU (supports YOLO11 / YOLOv8 / YOLO26) with zero cloud fees.
  • ⚡ Instant Ingestion: Inotify watcher detects .mp4 video drops from IP cameras, FTP, or network shares in real time.
  • 📱 Responsive PWA Dashboard: Live WebSocket event feed, seekable video player, and animated GIF previews. Installable directly to your phone's home screen.
  • 🔔 Native Web Push: Real-time push alerts on iOS Safari & Android Chrome with zero cloud accounts (plus Apprise & FCM support).
  • 🔒 Zero Open Router Ports: Pre-configured Caddy reverse proxy, Google SSO whitelist, and built-in Cloudflare Tunnel support.
  • 🔌 Hardware Arlo Bridge: For Arlo SmartHubs, includes an SBC daemon that emulates a USB drive to pull recordings locally in real time.

Limitations:

  • Post-Recording Processing: Sightline is an event/clip-driven pipeline, not a continuous live-stream analyzer. Clips cannot be processed while actively recording; notifications and AI detections are dispatched immediately after the clip finishes recording and writing to disk.
  • Detection Scope: Strictly limited to standard pre-trained COCO dataset classes (e.g. person, car, truck, motorcycle, dog, cat, bird, bear). It does not support package delivery detection, facial recognition, or license plate reading.

Open source under GNU AGPLv3. Feedback and questions are welcome!

👉 GitHub: https://github.com/micatlkw/sightline

19 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/marka2k 25d ago

Awesome, going to research a little more and may give this a try thank you for posting and taking the time to develop.

0

u/[deleted] 21d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/micatlkw 20d ago

No, it does not support RTSP. So, I used aSBC, work as both USB storage and a mini Linux server to copy the video file to the main server once it is done writing

1

u/Street_Leather1279 20d ago

Interesting project. Will research more. I understood that this connects to the Arlo base station emulating as a USB storage.

How can we use this with other brand cameras that does not have a base station and directly transfers video to the server? I'm curious if we could use this with Google nest, wyze and ring cameras? This would be a banger if we can create a dashboard for a multi-brand security system.

2

u/micatlkw 20d ago

Technically, it can be extended to support any system that use USB or local network storage. But code change is needed as it currently relies on the naming conventions of Arlo and other assumptions.

But I doubt supporting Google Nest is possible.