My guess is they want to preemptively Dodge the allegations thst it’s a bad phone because it might not have the top of the line camera.

You got it! Best of luck with the baby

There are multiple wifi-connected solar powered cameras that will do the motion-activation, IR night mode, etc. thing that you’re asking for, that you can just drop into a location, but they won’t be self hosted.

Unfortunately pretty much everything you’d self host takes time and finagling, it’s just the price of privacy/independence. I know you’re asking for a self hosted solution but that will be difficult with little free time. I’ve been running frigate for a year and I still can’t get some object detection masks to properly ignore detections.

You’ll want to be running frigate, a self hosted nvr solution.

Camera wise, you’ll probably want a power over Ethernet (poe) amcrest or hikvision camera for continuous video to be sent to the nvr to do the detection. A list of recommended hardware is found here.

I’ll be honest though, depending on where this is you might be better off with a non-self hosted setup. For example, reolink makes several battery/solar powered wifi cameras that record on motion, shooting notifications to your phone. No cables to run