I had a lot of fun installing an industrial outdoor pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera on my roof in Seattle. Whereas most townhouses built today have rooftop decks, my townhouse has a curved metal roof. Being near Lake Union, it has a phenomenal view from the top of the roof, showing the city, the lake, and even Gasworks park. Since it’s pretty difficult and unsafe to get up on that roof, I did the next best thing, which was to install a camera. This was inspired by this skybot cam post.
I spent a lot of time looking at camera options. New cameras from US vendors seem to be roughly $30k, which was way out of range. So I checked alibaba. Sure enough, there was a pretty awesome looking one with 4K resolution.
I was a little skeptical of how it would turn out, but was pleasantly surprised with the build quality and reliability. It showed up pretty quickly and I tested it out.
Getting into the firmware took a second because the password on the sticker was misspelled. I was able to figure it out and get in. The firmware was pretty solid with lots of cool features, and the camera supports basic ONVIF stuff so I can control it with standardized software, e.g. in Home Assistant via Frigate.
The next step was getting it on the roof. I put it in a laundry bag and hoisted it up. I also found amazing S-5! clips that are great for mounting stuff to metal roofs without drilling. To get it level on the curved roof, I eventually bought some of that Zinc-Plated Slotted Angle plate to build a little angled platform.
For grounding, I got a little ethernet grounding thing and one for the power cord too and hooked them up to a ground that I ran down the outside of the house.
I punched a hole in the wall and sealed it up to get the power through.
Here we are all mounted up on the roof.
This thing has a windshield wiper!
Then I made a youtube channel to stream cool stuff going on. The biggest hit was definitely new years fireworks, though the recording on Youtube truncated and doesn’t show the night scenes. Oh well.
The Auroras were pretty nice one night
Anyway I totally enjoyed installing and having a roof cam.