Reolink Wireless Doorbell – First Impressions

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by Lisa

A friend of Scott’s got a Eufy doorbell on sale from Amazon, so we started checking out camera/doorbell devices again. Eufy didn’t seem to allow local access to the video stream. We found three companies that did offer direct access to the RTSP stream: Doorbird, Amcrest, and Reolink. The Doorbird ones were like a thousand dollars … and, for way under a grand, I could DIY something. Amcrest looked like a viable solution, but Amazon had the Reolink ones for sixty bucks less — including a $10 “prime member” discount price. We bought two and set them up inside the house.

The physical hardware is an oval shaped plastic box with a camera & IR ring near the top and a glowing button (you can turn the LED light off in the config) for visitors to press. I wish the logo wasn’t printed onto the plastic, though.

Once you enable RTSP under the advanced network settings, you can access the primary (high resolution) video feed at rtsp://username:password@doorbell.example:554/h264Preview_01_main and the secondary (640×480) video feed at rtsp://username:password@doorbell.example:554/h265Preview_01_sub

I like that you can set up a “read only” user — our Zoneminder installation doesn’t need to be able to configure the devices. It will also grab a photo to make a time lapse series — while seeing the driveway over time might not be too interesting, having a time lapse of our front yard will be really cool. This requires adding an SD card to the doorbell, but still very cool.

5GHz worked fine in the house, but we had a lot of drop-outs once it was mounted at the door.

You can upload your own key pair for the web server, so visiting the https page doesn’t throw an invalid certificate error. This is a personal thing that really bothers me with a lot of IoT implementations. It’s such a simple thing — there’s already a locally generated key pair, why not let me upload my own with a hostname or SAN that matches what I will be accessing. Even if you don’t have your own CA — you can get a free cert from Let’s Encrypt.

The fisheye camera catches a large field — we can see the entire front entrance — although I now understand why there are dual-camera doorbells with a “package camera”. If the camera is angled so you can see the face of someone pressing the button, you cannot see their feet. Or the ground where a package would be placed.

I don’t like that there doesn’t appear to be any way to ring the house door chime. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to use different tones for different doorbells. While we’ll get motion alerts from Zoneminder and be able to view both doorbell video feeds to see where the ring occurred … it would be nice to assign unique chimes to each doorbell.

SSH’ing to Older Cisco Access Points

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by Lisa

Trying to ssh into our Cisco access points, we get an error saying “no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1” … to one-off enable older, deprecated algorithms, we added a cisco.conf to /etc/ssh/ssh_config.d (/etc/ssh/ssh_config includes /etc/ssh/ssh_config.d/*.conf)

Host <IP>
     Ciphers 3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,aes128-cbc,aes128-ctr,aes256-ctr
     KeyAlgorithms diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

And restart sshd — voila*, you can SSH into the router / access point / etc.

* — you may get an invalid key length error. In this case, you need to regenerate the key on the Cisco device using a 2048-bit key:

config term
crypto key zeroize rsa
crypto key generate rsa modulus 2048
end

Hazelnut Pollen

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by Lisa

A few years after we planted our hazelnuts, I was eagerly awaiting the time when they would have pollen-y bits. Except I couldn’t find anything online about what I was looking for. We did, finally, see the developed bits over the winter … but, this year, I can actually see them starting to develop in late July.

Dragon Chow

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by Lisa

I calculated the “best deal” on dragon chow berries per fake gold coin in Anya’s DragonMania Legends game — I always tell her to get Clan Blue Hazel because you don’t need to keep “re-planting” them every couple of minutes, but the spikey cherries that grow in 30 seconds are actually the best “deal”.

 

Type Berries Coins Hours Berries Coins Berries per Coin
Spikey Cherry 65 195 0.008333 5 15 0.333333333
Purplemon 352 1950 0.083333 27.0769231 150 0.180512821
Clan Blue Hazel       2,860          19,500 2          220.00          1,500.00 0.146666667
Blue Hazel       2,600          19,500 2          200.00          1,500.00 0.133333333
Clan Sour Cone 1105 9750 0.5 85 750 0.113333333
Sour Cone 975 9750 0.5 75 750 0.1
Dragonscale       5,200          52,000 6          400.00          4,000.00 0.1
Dragonlandic Berry     19,500        195,000 12       1,500.00        15,000.00 0.1
Clan Star Fruit     71,500        780,000 24       5,500.00        60,000.00 0.091666667
Star Fruit     65,000        780,000 24       5,000.00        60,000.00 0.083333333
Sweetroot   650,000   10,400,000 48     50,000.00      800,000.00 0.0625
Candied Pear   390,000     7,500,000 42   130,000.00   2,500,000.00 0.052
Spring Cherry     97,500     2,600,000 1       7,500.00      200,000.00 0.0375
Clan Royal Fig   396,000   10,800,000 24   132,000.00   3,600,000.00 0.036666667
Royal Fig   360,000   10,800,000 24   120,000.00   3,600,000.00 0.033333333
Squarey Berry   120,000     4,800,000 6     40,000.00   1,600,000.00 0.025