My Nest cameras used to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, then Google came along and ruined any and all integration they had with other systems. I loved how I could have the porch light turn on for 15 min when motion was sensed.
I still like my G/Nest cams for the stand alone features they provide, such as; facial recognition, motion, sound, and package notifications. But I am in the market for some additional cameras, and thought I would try to find something that I can use to report events to my HE system, but I am not coming up with anything, and all the previous threads on this subject seem to be a year or two old, so I am wondering if anybody has any fresh ideas or might know of any new products that might serve my purpose.
It looks like there are some workarounds out there that people have tried, but I am really looking for something that works natively with HE. I used to rely heavily on IFTTT as my rule machine, but when they started charging, I decided to make the move from Smartthings to HE, and make everything local.
I don't think there is anything direct as yet, but I use Reolink which send email or ftp alerts as an option. I have asked if they will add an endpoint field we could use - that would create a direct connection for alerts. In the meantime I use email with an intermediate local server, and upon receipt of the email a script sends a curl to a hubitat endpoint which activates a virtual motion sensor twinned with each camera.
Look at Blue Iris https://blueirissoftware.com/ as your NVR running on a spare Windows 10 machine then you can use just about any ONVIF or RTSP compatible IP cameras like Dahua, Amcrest, Hikvision, and many more.
Blue Iris integrates with HE to the point where you can have HE manage the Blue Iris profiles with the HE modes so when your away it activates all cameras and disable some or all when you're home. When a camera detects motion you can have it activate a HE virtual motion sensor so you can automate lights. You can also use DeepStack (free) or SmartSentry AI (subscription) with Blue Iris for AI person detection to minimize false positives.
It does require that you migrate to a Google account (if you haven't already) - but it receives events from Google and updates device attributes accordingly. If you run into any trouble with it, drop a note on the thread I linked.
The direct SDM API is probably the way to go (untested by me) two interesting options - the outstanding starling hub which is designed to integrate nest devices into HomeKit - also now has a very simple REST API for lan - grab snapshots get status of motion all sorts of good stuff https://www.starlinghome.io/ (check developers link)
The other option - and I always wanted to make a turnkey product for this - is email the notification alerts somewhere to process
I setup a custom amazon lambda setup with rekognition to look for vehicles and people that works with any camera that can send email alerts (NOT PLUG AND PLAY by a long shot) but maybe something like this exists
FYI NONE of this applies to the new battery nest cam or doorbell which only works inside the google home app with a google account and is not supported by SDM as far as I am aware - there isn’t even a way to make native google home routines I don’t think really based on the alerts
Just grabbed an amcrest floodlight camera. Its pretty loaded with features.
There is no built in method for it to submit events to HE but there is a local api that they have published and you can poll for motion events as well as controlling the light.
There is a community driver for it and polling for motion can probably be added as a request.
