I'm about a week into owning my Hubitat and am still working on the learning curve. I've been experimenting with a few things and one that I wanted to try was getting motion detection working on the cameras I have hooked up to my Synology NAS through Surveillance Station. I know that a motion detector is favorable over the camera but I wanted to mess around and learn some more tricks. Besides, the motion sensor I have in use right now is junk because it eats batteries like crazy. Something wrong internally because a cell will only last about 2 weeks. I found a year old topic on the matter HERE using the Maker API but it looks as if Surveillance Station has gone through an update since then and the screen shots do not match up with what I'm seeing. Any suggestions to help me along? "Get a new motion detector" is perfectly acceptable as well though I don't learn as much that way.
I don't have a Synology but I can see what that procedure is trying to do. Somewhere in your Synology set up screens is an option to trigger an external device when the chosen camera detects motion. The trigger calls into Hubitat to the Maker API device you set up in Hubitat to trigger a Hubitat virtual motion sensor. I've done something conceptually similar with MotionEye.
The problem I think is that on the Action Rule page, it does not have "External Device" as is shown in your post. Attached is a screenshot of what my screen looks like.
The "Webhooks" option gives a window very similar to what is under the "External Device" in your screenshots except it has a Method option of Auto, Get, Post, and Put . I put the same kind of information into the URL, click the "Test Send" button, it fails in Surveillance Station but I get an event recorded in the Hubitat log.
2020-01-24 10:20:57.097 pm [debug] findDevice called
2020-01-24 10:20:57.085 pm [debug] sendDeviceCommand called
Thanks for helping out. I'm going to do some more research tomorrow and see if I can learn exactly what is going on.
Took me a little longer than I would have liked, but I figured it out. The Webhooks works the same way as the External Devices in the original thread does. Just leave the method as "Get". What was throwing me off was the virtual device. Not realizing that there was an actual virtual device defined further down in the list, when I added the virtual motion detector I chose "Generic Component Motion Sensor". It did not have actual active and inactive states which is why Surveillance Station reported failed every time I tested it. However, once I added the "Virtual Motion Detector" it all started coming together. I could not confirm it until just now because I had an issue with my cameras. They disconnected and I could not get Surveillance Station to find them again. Anyway, that is fixed and my issue is solved. And I learned a lot, which was a main point of this exercise.
I know this isn't helpful... I love my Synology, but wasn't that thrilled with Surveillance Station. And the licensing costs for it were insane ($50 per camera, on a device that I already spent over $1k on). I can buy decent quality POE 1080p cameras for $40, but the license to use them costs more. They also did not advertise that the product was limited to 2 cameras and then you had to start paying for more.
I ditched Surveillance Station. I went with Unifi Protect from Ubiquity Networks. It was cheaper in the long run (with G3 Flex cameras), and frankly, it works better. I don't think their API is very robust though, at least right now. Everything is stored locally, but still available remotely through their cloud service. NO monthly charges for anything. I have 6 cameras on mine recording 24/7. Adding 3 more when it warms up.
