For those not in the know, Camect is an Indiegogo NVR that is local - so it keeps all your camera content local - even cloud ones like Wyze. The best part is that it's AI-based, so you don't get false alerts - like ever. I had all kinds of PIR motion detectors tied into my home automation system to try and rule out false positives with my Hikvision cameras, but this takes it to a new level. While the content stays local, it's also accessible via webRTC, thus, you can get to it off-network. It supports ratings (i.e. don't show me dogs in this area of the camera at a similar time) and other great features. It also has an API which I've integrated with below. I suggest you check them out and invest in a device - Yes, I know Blue Iris does this, but this this AI is far better than Blue Iris. There is no tinkering required here. There is a subscription fee per camera beyond 2 cameras, but only if you want to access them off-network - they also haven't started charging this fee yet. If you want to use VPN, then you're not subject to this.
Natively connect to the local Camect Webservice to subscribe to motion events and can reflect those into virtual motion devices within Hubitat.
Sync Camect's Home and Default location modes with HSM - allowing you to enable different cameras when you're home/away.
Create motion disabler's. These are triggers within Hubitat (presence change, motion event, contact change, lock change) which let you disable motion alerting for any number of cameras for a given period of time. My use-case is if I'm leaving the house, or if I'm pulling in the driveway, I can suppress alerts for 60 seconds. While the Camect AI is good, and the thumbs up/thumbs down helps with suppressing events you don't want to see, there's not a good way to suppress events that you generate. The goal of the disablers is to use a combination of Hubitat events to guess when the activity is you vs. someone else.
There is no video included in this. There is, however, additional information contained within the virtual motion devices that might be handy:
LastURL: which links to last cloud (your home device over webRTC) URL that will display the last alert.
Objects: Shows what was in the alert; person, truck, dog, cat, car, etc.
Thanks! I hope they hurry up and add selective notification disablement OR another mode. I’d really like to use presence to disable notifications when I know it’s me vs a guest. Should be pretty simple if I can key off of contacts/locks/motion/presence and kick off a timer to re-enable notifications. It’ll depend how they implement but it’s definitely on my list.
New version up. Haven’t updated docs yet or HPM, but this features the ability to disable camera alerts based on come criteria (leaving the house, arriving, etc). This piece doesn’t require the raspberry pi connector. LMK if it’s working for you.
Looks like @ogiewon has a great example of websockets usage in his Logitech Driver (thanks @augoisms for the pointer: [RELEASE] WeatherFlow Lite). Hopefully I'll have some time this weekend to remove the raspberry pi dependency - it looks like a simple change..
Hi @brianwilson,
Thanks for making this a reality! I’m using the 1.3.0 natively and it works great to use motion to trigger actions etc. Have a noob question though. How do you get the object type into Hubitat? Would like to use specific object recognition to trigger different responses. Thanks again.
Thanks Brian! This will be epic! I am having trouble connecting it however. Here are the logs. It happens when I put in my local code, username and password. When I click next, I get: " Unexpected Error
An unexpected error has occurred trying to load the app. Check Logs for more information.
Error: Cannot get property 'camera' on null object" then the logs look like this screenshot... I can log in from my browser fine and I use the same username and password. Any Ideas? I am on Eero mesh with opendns nameservers. TIA
Looks like it can't connect to your local camect system. Make sure your_host.l.home.camect.com resolves/loads in a web browser. If you're unsure of the your_host part, go here: https://local.home.camect.com, login and you'll see the host name. Also make sure your user and password are correct.
Brian, I wanted to thank you for not only developing this integration/app but for bringing my attention to the existance of Camect! I had never heard Camect until I came across this thread, and based on your description of the AI-powered notifications which reduce/eliminate false alerts I purchased one.
My situation is that I have a handful of Nest cameras and have become progressively more frustrated with the false alerts of the native Nest notifications. I had to disable their motion and sound notifications on all 5 cameras and 1 doorbell and rely solely on person and package notifications. I had to do this because the motion alerts falsely trigger if so much as a drop of rain is seen or a car's headlights so much as graze my front yard, and the sound alerts trigger if a bee farts in the general vicinity of one of the cameras.
(SIDE COMMENT: I know bees can't actually fart, or at least I don't think they can?)
Anywho, I just got my Camect yesterday and am still getting my head wrapped around it, but installed this integration/app from HPM this morning and am getting it all going.
Seconded! After getting my head wrapped around the concept of "interesting" and "uninteresting" alerts and figuring out how to use the thumbs up/down to train the machine learning model, I effectively get no false alerts during the daytime. I've even got it trained so that it is generating an alert when the USPS truck comes down the street and stops at my mailbox, but it is not generating an alert when the USPS truck heads back the other way on the street. This is definitely pretty awesome.
I know this isn't a Camect forum (is there a community forum somewhere?), but figured I'd try floating some questions here since this thread has assembled a small handful of Camect users:
[1]: Does anyone else use a night/infrared mode once dark? Do you see greatly degraded object detection?
[2]: What camera make/models are people using with Camect?
[3]: Anyone have multiple Camects in production? Does this work fairly seemlessly?
[1]: In my environment, Camect does not do a good job with object detection once the cameras switch over in to night/infrared mode, at least with my particular camera setup (3xGoogle Nest Outdoor IQ, 1xGoogle Nest Doorbell, 2xGoogle Nest Hub Max). I do have some ambient street light around the house so I'm going to try it with night/infrared mode off to see how it does -- but would love any feedback/insight on other people's experiences.
[2]: I'm open to moving my current camera setup to a different location and swapping out cameras since it's silly for all these Nest cameras to stream everything to Google Nest, only to have Camect immediately pull down all those same streams for processing/local storage. I'm curious what's good out there.
[3]: Looks like Camect says it can handle 24MP of processing. If I got new cameras (item 2), I presume I'd go 4K/8MP and would only want to land 3 cameras on a Camect. Could I fairly seamlessly stand up a second Camect and tie 3 cameras to each?
