Shelly’s are great. I have 24 of them installed(plugs,1pm,1pm mini) and they are the most reliable thing in terms of devices in my setup

apparently it’s possible without a relay look here

i had frigate running locally and could integrate them. That said i grabbed the stream from the local network. I guess you would need some sort of local pi to forward the streams. But that is well above my pay grade ^^ sorry

Reolink. Cheap, good enough quality, great HA integration, no internet connection needed.

Do NodeRED timers survive a restart?

hi logically i thing you are on the right track. A timer is defiantly the right way to go. You can try my blueprint for your automation. Hope it helps

just look for the HomeKit Bridge integration and expose what you want. I am running one bridge per device type (light,cover,sensor,switch…)