Ciñera is a live village monitoring system designed to stream a camera feed from a remote rural location to a public-facing website with zero ongoing infrastructure costs. Ciñera is the village where I live, and this platform is the website I built for my town.

The hardware stack is built around a Reolink RLC-810A 4K PoE camera, powered through a TP-Link TL-POE150S injector and connected to a Raspberry Pi 4B running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Debian 13 Trixie). The Pi acts as the media edge node, pulling the RTSP stream from the camera and repackaging it as HLS through MediaMTX v1.9.1.

Public exposure is solved through Cloudflare Tunnel instead of a VPS, static IP, or port forwarding. A single `cloudflared` daemon running as a systemd service on the Pi establishes an outbound-only tunnel to Cloudflare's edge, allowing the HLS stream to be published on a custom subdomain without opening inbound ports.

On the frontend, an Astro 6 site deployed on Cloudflare Pages consumes the live stream through a lightweight player based on hls.js, with native HLS fallback for Safari. The system is intentionally minimal and operationally cheap, while still maintaining a reliable public delivery path.

A few engineering lessons shaped the setup: DHCP leases caused a real outage when the camera IP changed, so static assignments are now mandatory for fixed devices. Debian Trixie uses NetworkManager instead of the older dhcpcd defaults found in many tutorials, which changes the networking workflow. MediaMTX with `Restart=always` under systemd also proved sufficient for most crash recovery scenarios, though RTSP health watchdog automation is the next operational improvement.

The next step is integrating an Ecowitt Wittboy GW2001 weather station to surface temperature, humidity, wind, rain, and UV data through a self-hosted endpoint on a Ugreen NAS and expose everything through the same Astro frontend.

• Raspberry Pi 4B edge node pulling RTSP and repackaging it to HLS with MediaMTX

• Cloudflare Tunnel for secure public delivery without static IPs or open ports

• Astro 6 frontend on Cloudflare Pages with hls.js and Safari native HLS fallback

• Low-cost infrastructure with systemd-managed services and operational recovery patterns

• Planned weather-station expansion through a self-hosted NAS endpoint