I've been using IFTTT to arm and disarm my Blink cameras for a little while now. It wasn't perfect but it worked. Now that IFTTT has decided to go $10 a month subscription plan, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look for other options.
One of the first solutions I found was Node-Red. I had no idea this existed. I started playing around with make simple flows. From what I've read, Node-Red can actually be faster than RM? Seems odd though considering it has to leave HE then come back.
Anyways, I found a node called node-red-contrib-viseo-blink, but I have no idea how to configure it. I know it requires a token, but where do I get that? I also tried using the login action, but it spits out a couple of errors one for a missing Viseo Bot Maker key and the other for a certificate error. I couldn't find any documentation through my searches.
Yea saw that today. Wish there was a 3rd party app to arm/disarm directly on Hubitat based on geofencing. Blink app only allows scheduled based arming.
With node red you can put it on a device with a lot more cpu and memory. If it's complex enough or your hub is already pretty loaded up it can help running it on the faster hardware. The hub is on you lan so it's not like going to some crappy st or iftt cloud. Really all depends on your setup and what you are trying to do which is faster though with rm or node red.
I'm glad I discovered Node-Red then! I have maybe 30ish rules, so it'll be a fun exercise converting some of those to node-red. I installed it on a mac mini that I have homebridge installed on also. That should be beefier than a raspberry pi.
A little off topic from my own post but, I finally got rid of my Smart Things devices and was using Hubconnect for both smartthings and homebridge. I'm wondering if I should use Maker API instead of hubconnect for homebridge and use the same maker api instance for node-red.
I was hoping Amazon would provide a way to arm/disarm Blink in an Alexa routine, but apparently not. The only thing you can do in a routine is to have Alexa open the Blink skill and accept your voice query. Not that useful.
Another strategy would be to ask Hubitat to publish more applets. There are already applets to arm and disarm Blink based on mode changes. Would be nice to have applets to arm and disarm Blink based on a switch.
Applets that Hubitat publishes are free and unlimited to IFTTT users on the free plan.
I may have spoken too soon. I was in the process of changing over to controlling Blink based on modes, but it appears to me that you can only have one instance of an "Arm Blink when Hubitat's mode changes" applet. And you can't trigger on multiple modes, or action multiple Blink zones (sync modules). You can't edit the applet's name. No way I can figure out (yet) how to arm for either of Away or Night, or arm more than one Blink zone/sync.
I whittled my ifttt recipes down to three for the free plan which include the blink disarm/arm, but for me, getting away from ifttt altogether is still the goal.
I was able to do the whittling down because I noticed at least one of my created recipes had a prebuilt applet version.
