Only took me about six months of reading through lots of Hubitat material but I finally got my Echo to play a doorbell sound when my camera see someone at the front door. I’m sure this will be simple for many of you but it was hard work for me.
Camera sees someone and reports to Blueiris.
Blueiris sends the image to AI for verification of a human.
Only if it’s a verified as a human, Blueiris will send through local endpoint to Hubitat rules.
Hubitat rules app will flip a virtual switch that is exposed to Alexa.
Echo will play a built-in doorbell sound whenever that virtual switch is flipped.
So today is a good day for me.
Dang, I had to go in and manually edit every place that said Hubitat and change it to Hubitat. My voice editing likes to spell it as habitat.
Congrats! Its always nice when you can get something set up that works.
In my case, I have a similar set up but I am using Camect’s object recognition which is also very good. When I set up my system two years ago BI’s object AI was not as good as Camect’s, although my understanding is that it has improved greatly over the last two years.
Since my camera also picks up “persons” which can show up on the street and driveway as well as at the front door (my camera FoV is arranged so that I cannot just use the motion mask in Camect to block out beyond the porch), I have a hidden wired motion sensor set up by my front door which points downwards from the porch covering just in front of the front door. Camect is integrated with Hubitat via the Camect Connect app. When HE recognizes that Camect has identified a “person” AND the motion sensor picks up simultaneous movement at the front door/porch, a virtual switch (with auto off) is momentarily switched on in RM. Via the HE Amazon Echo Skill, this triggers a door chime in Alexa and an announcement that states that “someone is at the front door” via Echo Speaks. Depending on the time of day, armed state of the security system (un-armed, stay armed or away armed), this may also turn on the front yard lights, make an alternative announcement over my Echo devices, send a Pushover notification, and/or also gives off a verbal warning (if the system is armed) warning off any unwanted “visitors” over the external speakers.
System has been working pretty flawlessly for just under the past two years now, and just as importantly, the WAF has been great. The use of person recognition AI along with a motion sensor prevents false positives (from wildlife or lighting changes/shadows affecting the motion sensors, etc), and its nice that a similar setup at the back entrance lets us know verbally whether a person (or person delivering a package) is at the front or back door (rather than just a generic chime).
Hubitat is pretty amazing in what it can do with just a little imagination! Plus, its just plain fun (especially when everything works as planned, LOL).
What you’ve done sounds pretty cool. Also very complicated. Thanks for posting that as I learn a lot from reading what other people have done and I really appreciate it.
Not really that complicated. It just “layers” and combines a number of community app capabilities (Camect Connect, Amazon Echo Skill, and Echo Speaks). I am no expert at this and I did this when I was an absolute complete noob as it was done when I just got my Hubitat and Camect two years ago. This community helped me along patiently sharing their expertise which is why despite my limited experience, I like to share to give back to the community as much as I can. In addition to some pretty amazing hardware capabilities (given its small physical size and relatively limited computing power) it is this community and staff that is the real “power” behind the hub.
I am so on the fence about purchasing Camect to replace Xeoma as my NVR... I can't find much about integrating Xeoma into HE which keeps pushing me more towards Camect...
As an FYI of the capacity limitation of Camect: I have been using Camect for 2 years now and have been very happy with its AI object recognition. However, I have another NVR that records 24/7 as well since Camect is limited to 24MB of camera stream so if you have three 4K (8MB) cameras you have already hit its limit. I only stream to Camect at 1080p (2MB) to get around this to take advantage of the great object recognition and ability to integrate with HE, while simultaneously streaming these same cameras at 4K to my other non-HE integrated NVR (you obviously need cameras capable of doing multiple streams at your desired resolutions in order to do this). I am therefore able to run 7 cameras in my system. You need to work out the math if you have more cameras (or get more than one Camect). Camect says they are working on a higher capacity model but I am not aware of their state of anticipated release at this time. Hope this info helps to inform your decision.
External storage can be added (I have a 4TB external hard drive connected to mine). It is the memory (not storage) that is the major limitation. The memory (limited to 24MB) is what limits the total number/resolution of the cameras you can have connected at any given time to a given Camect hub. The storage only determines how many days of recording (depending on said resolution and number of cameras) that can be kept.
Since I do not really need more cameras, this is not an issue in my use case but others may find this to be an unacceptable limitation.
Yes, eight cameras can be handled but only if streaming at 1080p, which is OK to use if you are only using Camect for the object recognition and to monitor your cameras (which can be accessed remotely although the system is completely local and not cloud dependent). This uses about 16MB of the 24MB capacity. My 1TB internal Camect drive along with my 4TB external drive allows for plenty of storage (albeit at 1080p). However, if you wish to keep a high resolution record of your stream, then you will need a separate NVR in addition to the Camect. I use a Amcrest NVR to keep simultaneous recordings at 4K (8MP) for most of my cameras (and in some cases 5MP or about 2K for a couple of my less capable cameras). Quite frankly, I find that 1080p is more than adequate virtually 100% of the time when I am just checking on an alert. Also, if I am checking remotely, I do not want to stream multiple 4K cameras remotely anyway (unless you are on 5G, which I am not).
An additional limiting factor is what your NVR can handle as well. Mine supposedly can handle 8 cameras at a full 4K, but if the network gets too crowded, the frame rate can drop. Another limiting factor is what your LAN will support (best to keep security camera system separate from the rest of your network if possible, running eight 4K cameras is like having your network handle eight streaming 4K TVs at the same time). My cameras are all hard wired network cameras and so my network easily handles all the feeds. I imagine this would not be the case with eight wifi cameras at 4K each.
Bottom line is that with the improvements with Blue Iris with regards to object recognition, if you don’t mind maintaining a constantly running PC to run it on, Blue Iris scales much better than Camect. I believe BI still lags behind Camect regarding the sophistication of its object recognition (but I do not know this for a fact as I am comparing the capabilities of both from about 2 years ago). Camect will differentiate between various types of animals (dogs cats, bears, squirrels, deer, raccoons and others, etc) as well as different delivery companies such as FedEx, UPS, Amazon, USPS etc, If that is a feature that you can use or do find helpful (I do for my announcements) then Camect is nice if you can get around the streaming limitation of 24MB.
Sorry for the long post but I just wanted to pass on some of my experience as I wish I knew some of this when I got into this two years ago. It would have saved me a lot of hassles, LOL. Hope someone finds this helpful.
It is very helpful!!! Currently Xeoma runs on a VM on a blade with 90 gigs ram and 2x1gb bound ports dedicated to that VM. So it should be fine for what I run. I don't run 4k generally (2k maybe for 1/2 my cams and 1080 for the cheapy ones. Most are foscam) I thought the Camect might be a nice way to slim things down but based on your info (which I really appreciate) I'll stick with my hardware and just switch over to Blue Iris which also seems much cheaper in the long run than Xeoma. With Xeoma updates are only valid for a year and for 8 cams is much more expensive.
Blueiris updates are only valid for one year as well. I think the current rates are about $60 for one year worth of updates but no one says you have to do that every year. I’m running three systems of Blueiris and two of them are two years old. The system I keep current does run 12 4K cameras and it works wonderful.
