Eggs, baskets, and lessons being taught about how it’s not a good idea to heavily skew their ratio.
SwizzleStick
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Ok so the combination is:
- This camera board
- This external antenna
- This project
- A shell I designed myself in SketchUp (skp download). Note that’s not the final version, as I lost some design files.
And the finished item:

All assembled, they will give a decent enough feed to frigate for the basics. Just don’t expect miracles in the resolution or framerate departments. 3fps does fine for my use case of tracking critters.
Gladly. I’ll collate a few bits later - time for work.
New to me & bookmarked. I am sure I have some crap lying around that this would work with.
Thank you!
For hardware, anything that can provide a local rtsp stream is a good place to start. I run cheap and cheerful mix of tapo, unbranded and homebrew esp32 cams. Offload the motion/object detection and alerts to something that can pull in the feeds, and isolate the cams to local network only.
WiFi usually ok, but at least hardwire the power to save future grief.
Using frigate to manage mine, which is running under Homeassistant - another project worth looking up.
A few images, featuring Freddie the visitor:






It would definitely be a size thing for adding Ethernet (PoE or otherwise) to small boards like these. The ones I am using are already bigger than they ought to be - the bottom half is just a glorified serial interface and power input for USB. The esp plugs into this through pin/header. If I were less lazy, they could be about half the thickness in a final product. No PoE I suppose also keeps them cheap, which is always good for me. The casings were my first ‘proper’ design and entry into resin printing.
The Tapo kit I have found to be a good balance of price, features and quality. I have a Tapo C310 mounted outdoors at another building, which has done great in all weathers. Initial setup does require the app/service last time I checked, but it can be made to serve RTSP locally after that. Very good for the ~£30 price point.