ROOT (Software)
Hey Hacker News! The past few months I’ve been working on this open-source software stack that makes it easy to build your own privacy-first security camera. When searching for a security camera (e.g. Google Nest, Amazon Ring..) that guarantees privacy I was surprised to find out there’s no such option, apart from going the old-school route. Many of the big players also had major privacy scandals. It has gotten even worse over the last couple of months with Amazon Ring now working together with Flock Safety, a company helping law enforcement with mass surveillance. Using the ROOT software…
ROOT (Software) launched on January 26, 2026 with 6 votes, #2,272 of 14,584 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
ROOT is creating a private home-security camera with on-device AI vision, local storage capabilities, and smart features. Today, I'm launching the software stack, which makes it easy to build your own ROOT-powered surveillance system. Features: - Remotely access your camera - ML-powered person, pet, and car detection - On-demand video and audio streaming - End-to-end encryption with forward secrecy
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey Hacker News! The past few months I’ve been working on this open-source software stack that makes it easy to build your own privacy-first security camera. When searching for a security camera (e.g. Google Nest, Amazon Ring..) that guarantees privacy I was surprised to find out there’s no such option, apart from…
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Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)2024 · github.com · ▲551I needed a security camera inside my house, one that would send motion notifications to my smartphone and would allow me to livestream remotely. However, I could not find one that I could trust due to privacy concerns. Many of them upload the plaintext of videos to their servers and none is fully open-source as far as I know. Therefore, I decided to use my spare time to build one from scratch. Called Privastead (as in Private Homestead), it uses OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption (between the camera local hub and the smartphone) and is mostly implemented in Rust (except for part of the…
Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)May 2026 · github.com · ▲137Hey everyone, I previously introduced an open source private home security camera in 2024, which uses OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42284412. It was called Privastead then and it's now renamed to Secluso. John Kaczman found my project from here and has been working on it with me over the last year and half. We've made a lot of improvements to the software, which we would like to share with you: - You can now set this up on your Raspberry Pi in less than 5 minutes with no technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. We've…
- IMI made a tiny camera with super long battery life2024 · toaster.llc · ▲843
Hey HN! A few years ago someone kept trying to steal my motorcycle, so I decided to make a small camera with really long battery life to catch them. The hardware/software is totally open source, but the companion app only supports macOS currently. (I'm a big fan of native apps, and didn't want to block releasing on Linux/Windows support.) I wrote some blog posts about the process: PCB design: https://toaster.llc/blog/pcb Enclosure design: https://toaster.llc/blog/enclosure Image pipeline:…
Update: Open-source private home security camera(end-to-end encryption)2025 · github.com · ▲17Several months ago, I posted in Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42284412) about this project (previously named Privastead, now changed to Secluso). It's a privacy-preserving home security camera that uses OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption between the camera and the mobile app. The post received a good amount of attention and there were many good comments. Since then, my project cofounder and I have made major improvements to the project. The project previously would act as a hub for an IP camera, which was otherwise closed source. But now, our camera software can…
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