About a year ago i decided to upgrade my early 90's X10 home automation. I had gone to Radio Shack (Boy do I miss them, pre cell phone) and purchased a motion detector and switches to automate my outside flood lights, and notify me when somebody drove up my driveway. There was no problem turning the lights on and ringing a chime and lighting a single light inside after dark, and only ringing the chime and lighting the inside light during the day.
Let me mention that I am a controls engineer / PLC ā HMI programmer, a typical system work on has around 100 digital IO, 100 Analog IO, uses 20 to 40 IP addresses, and the PLC program, if printed would be 500 -1000 pages long. Our instruction manuals are usually 150 to 200 pages long, and out HMI trends 250 channels, and logs 300 bits.
I assumed (yes, i know what happens when you assume) that duplicating this behavior would be easy today. WRONG! I bought into the Alexa/Zigbee world and bought an Alexa, a couple of Blink XT2 "Outdoor" cameras, and a handful of Zigbee wall switches.
Everything arrived, and what do I find, but that Alexa only allows one ātriggerā to an action. I can turn the outside lights on when it gets dark, and back off in the morning, or I can turn them on when the camera notices motion, and back off a little later, but not only after dark.
I then started investigating, and purchased a Hubitat Hub. It seemed to make the most sense of the available It is still not easy to make duplicate early 90ās technology, but I was able to get what I wanted except for the lag time caused by the amount of time required for the information to cross the internet, bounce around blinks servers, then travel back to turn on the lights. On a good day this takes 15 seconds, sometimes up to a minute, except when my DSL is down, which happens for at least a couple of hours a week. When the internet is down, Alexa, instead of telling me there is no internet, when I ask her to do something, says something like āThere are many things with that name, which one do you want?ā instead of telling me there is no internet. When it is down for over an amount of time that I havenāt figured out yet, she gives up trying to connect, and needs to be rebooted. If I donāt notice this, my lights donāt work.
UNTIL, the āoutdoorā Blink cameras saw the first below freezing night of the year. The cameras stop working below freezing, or above around 90 ā°F. Just after I bought them, Blink announced a new generation of camera, that require a $5 a month subscription. Now when they are just over a year old, tone has dies completely, the second says it is offline, but still, sometimes, trigger a motion alarm. Blink support recommends upgrading, at regular cost, to the new generation, and paying the monthly fee.
So, I am looking for an all-local solution. Is there a camera system that will interface with Hubitat and give me what I am looking for, or do I need both a camera (It didnāt take long to get used to having a video record of all my driveway motion, and the camera explained many of the āfalse alarmsā we had with the X10 system, including deer, turkeys, fox, bear and wasps) and a motion detector? If I go with camera and motion detector, can it be set up so the motion detector tells the camera to record. With either solution I want to be able to view the cameras recording and live across the internet. To make it a little harder, the cameras need to communicate over WiFi, I donāt want to dig a 100 foot ditch across my driveway to the cameras on the garage that can see the end on the driveway.