I replaced the original transformer this morning. It was a 10V 5VA unit so not much of a mystery why the indoor chime wasn't ringing. With the new transformer installed the indoor chime works as expected and I'm seeing 26.1V across the doorbell's power terminals. Hopefully this takes care of the lockup issue.
Any suggestion of camera to be used with HE on a dashboard but without the need of INTERNET connection all time, that's my main concern.
I can provide a DHCP server on my intranet for the camera to get IP but I would like to access it on my dashboard while I am offline.
Any suggestion? please Brand+MODEL
I have blink cameras but I cant figure out how to get HE to recognize them
Alone Hubitat doesn't recognize Blink cameras . You have to add the Hubitat app for IFTTT ( if this then that). Then go into IFTTT and use arm and disarm Blink cameras when Hubitat mode changes. So first go into Hubitat and in the app section choose IFTTT to add . Then sign up for IFTTT and register to allow it to connect to both Blink and Hubitat
So my Amcrest PoE cameras and NVR have been in operation for approx 4 months now. With the exception of a camera in the garage, all of the cameras are located outdoors.
All cameras are set up to send motion detection event notifications. I've tried an endless combination of threshold and sensitivity settings, and limiting detection areas on the cameras and have come to the following conclusion: pixel based motion detection sucks and is nearly useless.
I either get hammered with motion detection from moving shadows, leaves, tree branches, etc., during the day, and insects attracted to the IR lighting at night, or have to set the sensitivity so low that people aren't reliably detected. This morning while at work my phone was going off multiple times a minute for over an hour because it was sunny AND windy and the result was moving shadows from tree branches.
The camera in the garage isn't much better; shadows cast by sunlight coming in through the side entry door or moving headlights casting shadows through the windows all cause a frustratingly unmanageable number of alerts.
In general, motion detection false positives occur so frequently that I've grown tired of whipping out my phone to check only to discover another shadow based "threat".
What are your experiences and what have you done (if anything) to make motion detection useful?
I use Blue Iris which allows you to setup multiple zones within a frame. With multiple zones you can utilize a zone crossing function where an object has to cross into another zone or zones, before motion is detected. This helps reduce false alerts drastically.
I'll be one of the weirdos in here in saying I love my Arlo cameras.
No, I can't integrate them easily with Hubitat - and haven't tried. Haven't had any real need/desire to, either.
In terms of capturing events when there are real motion events, they have been absolutely flawless for me.
Solar panels keep the batteries charged, and it has been basically 100% hands-off since installing (no managing software, rules, servers/computers, etc) - which is what I wanted.
I've thought about using BI but am concerned that it won't really solve my problems.
The camera at the front of the house is located at one end of the house and is mounted to the soffit. It's aimed such that it looks at my front door and walkway and captures a good portion of my front yard and part of the street. Morning sun shines through the trees in the front yard and casts shadows on my front lawn, walkway, and side of the house. It also moves the leaves on a holly shrub with shiny leaves which changes the way sunlight reflects off of them. All of these are in the camera's field of view and even the slightest amount of wind causes a large amount of moving shadows throughout the majority of the image. The image below should give you an idea of what I'm dealing with. The camera's detection area is set to exclude the street and parts of the siding where you can clearly see the shadow pattern of the leaves.
I have a shadow related motion detection issue in the garage as well. When it's dark out, the light from the headlights of cars driving around on the corner on the street perpendicular to mine leaks through the horizontal blinds on the garage windows facing the street. The lights act like searchlight beacons, traveling around the inside of the garage creating a fair amount of image change over a very short period of time.
Then there's the bug issue. This could likely be improved by disabling the camera's IR and adding an external IR illuminator located away from the camera but I don't really want another item mounted to the soffit for esthetic reasons.
(and a bonus spider web to boot!)
Can BI really solve these issues without poking a crazy amount of motion ignore regions in the camera FOV?
[EDIT]
Can BI do this?
https://www.sighthound.com/products/sighthound-video
BI has Sentry integration, but I don't use it so I don't know how well it works.
this 
I've played with a load of different cameras over the years and none of them are reliable for motion detection in my experience.
The only exceptions are cameras that have an actual PIR / motion sensor built in. As @JasonJoel mentions Arlo are pretty good, and I've had decent results with Ring too, but they are really standalone systems aside from the somewhat hacky integrations that are possible.
What I tend to do now with my Foscam cameras is to have them recording 24/7 to my NVR and then use ZigBee or Z-Wave motion sensors to "mark" the NVR recordings when motion is detected via the NVR dry contact inputs.
IMO it's a much more reliable setup as you get proper motion notifications from the motion sensors (and they are easier to move around to ensure no false positives), and you get the NVR recordings tagged appropriately. I also grab snapshot stills for the notifications.
The deal breakers for me with Arlo and similar cloud cameras were battery power and cloud sub. My cameras are monitoring a vacation property so having the batteries die between visits is a no-go. I considered the solar panel workaround but wasn't crazy about mounting them to the side of the house, That said, PIR motion detection would likely prevent the majority of the motion issues I'm experiencing.
This sounds very interesting. Can you provide more info?
Sounds interesting, though the cloud processing and annual sub is a bit of a turn-off. I'd be curious how much internet bandwidth this uses for multiple cameras since I'd guess it would need to stream the video (or upload still frames pretty frequently) to their server. My ISP (Cox) sucks and has a 1TB monthly data cap. Oh, and did I mention they suck?
I reached out to SightHound to find out what their recommended system requirements are for up to 10 4MP camera. Their answer; a 9th Gen i7 box 
I use these NVRs - Buy Foscam FN3109H 9 Channel IP Camera NVR | Foscam UK
The have 4 dry-contact inputs on the back that you can assign to camera channels (so four cameras you can trigger for external alarms).
Any dry-contact relay can be used (Z-Wave / ZigBee) but I use KMtronic devices for this - https://www.kmtronic.com/
One of their 8 channel relays lets me "ping" 4 cameras on each of my two NVRs .... when playing back you can search all recordings or just alarm recordings.
Arlo cameras can be powered. Just plug them into an appropriate charger/power supply. Ok, I suppose it's continually charging the battery but it seems to work fine. I guess nothing different to a laptop being plugged into power all the time.
I thought I'd update this thread in case anyone is looking to solve constant false positives with pixel based motion detection. I'm a bit less than a week into my SightHound Video trial and people detection works extremely well. Prior to SightHound I was using Amcrest motion detection and receiving dozens (sometimes hundreds!) of false positives from everything from moving shadows, rain, leaves blowing around, birds, and squirrels. Nighttime false positives were so bad that I had a schedule set up that disabled alerts from 8 PM to 8 AM. Worse, the alerts were so inaccurate that I was ignoring them throughout the day.
SiightHound has reduced these to approx 1 false positive per day--truly amazing.
Go with ring... They have solar options too so you never have to worry about the battery
What cameras are you using with sighthound? Can you see them in the dashboard?
Thanks
All of my cameras are Amcrest 3MP ONVIF cameras.
[EDIT] Actually, I also have an ONVIF Hikvision video doorbell that's also being monitored by SightHound.
I haven't tried anything with the dashboard yet but SightHound has the ability to execute a webhook on motion detection. I'm not sure what I'll do with this yet but it opens some interesting possibilities.
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Nah, not really interested in a cloud solution that forces me to pay Ring $100 a year forever. I much prefer having 24/7 video (not just motion detected video) recorded and saved locally.
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