What motivated you to get started

The reason for me is I was lucky enough to survive a home invasion.

The reason I started with security cameras was because of package thief. Although nothing expensive but still upsetting with packages stolen from my front yard 3 times in a year.

I started with just 1 WiFi camera as my motivation in the beginning was not necessarily to ID the thief. I just want to know what happen and who did it. My search result online always
ended up in this forum when I want to learn something about security cameras. So, I finally registered after reading the forum for about a year.

I'm really grateful for all the knowledge I can learn from everyone here and the platform provided by the guys who run the site.

For me it was because I found out how easy it was for someone to come up to my house and screw with me. About 8 years ago I started having problems with air pressure in the front drivers side tire on my truck. It was low, about 10 pounds so I got out my air compressor and reinflated it. Well the next week it was low again, after 3 weeks I finally took it to a garage to get it fixed. They couldn't find any problems with the tire, since I was there I had them rotate the tires. A week later the front drivers side tire was low again! Being this was a different tire I knew that someone was F***ing with me, so I put a trail camera in a tree and caught a neighborhood kid deflating the tire. Now I have a BI system and 17 cameras.

Yeah. There's something oddly addictive about building a camera system. I first had the doorbell camera, but then we had a string of thefts on the street where I couldn't see them. So I put two more cameras up on the street. But they were shitty Google cameras and the resolution wasn't nearly high enough to be useful. So then I added some PoE cameras zoomed in on faces and license plates. Haven't had thefts since then. Then a fugitive ran through the backyard. Had cops out in front with long guns out. So I put up a few cameras out there. Mostly for watching deer. And the occasional fugitive, as one does. But now they all trigger all the time on spiders and rain, so here I am re-writing the TPU implementation for CPAI now to efficiently alert on actual people instead of rain and wind. My partner just rolls her eyes.