Toward Deep Camera Integrations

Unlike most of Smart home/automation related apps, HE has little if any Camera integrations:

On the list of

While Cameras are not just a fundamental part of home automation (and often the 1st thing someone would buy for his smart home), an excellent tool that often has several sensors..

Cameras can replace[and/or] act on the capacity of many IoTs as:

  • Motion sensor
  • Presence detection sensor (and it's subs human/pet/vihacle/face detection etc)
  • Pet/human Tracking
  • Gesture Identification
  • often equipped with basic Speakers/Siren capabilities ..
  • often has its own storage and can be used to extend storage capacity..
  • Sound/Light/UV/Color/Glass break and other AI related sensor

I wish we could see more camera drivers, a bunch of cool things could be built on top of a cameras, and it all starts with the Drivers

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I think the problem is at the camera. Most of them don't have API or not opened.
There are a few more community drivers. You can search for Hikvision, Reolink, Ubiquiti, armcrest and Blue Iris which covers hundred of camera brands.

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Honestly I think you are overselling the ability of the cameras without knowledge of the lack of their ability to actually allow external systems access to some of their advanced features.

That said Blue Iris has a slew of features similar to most of what you mentioned and as I understand it has the ability to be fully integrated. You should start their.

The problem is the ability to to integrate them as most systems are closed and don't allow easy integration with a system like Hubitat. Some systems do allow integration but then many of the functions you talk about are extremely limited or are not available to external systems like HE. This isn't exactly a new topic and almost every time the result is to look at Blue Iris or a similar on prem NVR system that can provide those functions.

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Camect.

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Two thumbs up for @brianwilson and Camect! But no gesture identification.

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There’s also this integration for Dahua (Amcrest) cameras. Dahua and Amcrest integration for cameras and doorbells

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You can do some of this with Blueiris. I use cameras as motion sensors, and things in Hubitat can even trigger recording events/alerts.

I can go as far as use AI with face detection to trigger different things.

While it is not a direct integration, Eufy cameras are accessible via ioBroker (and I suspect Node Red too) on a Raspberry Pi. You can either choose to write your automation in ioBroker (or Node Red) or create a simple pass through script and automate in HE.

I have done this and it works well. There is a bit more to setup and learning to do, but it isn’t a huge step, if you’re moderately technical, as you appear to be.

My use case was to fulfill a request from my wife. “I want the doorbell sound to be the Jetsons doorbell. “ we have Eufy cameras all around our home, but playing custom sounds isn’t a choice for Eufy.

I installed an Ecolink siren to play the sound file. It allows you to add sound files on an SD card. I setup ioBroker on a rPi, and I designed the automation to play the Jetsons doorbell sound when the Eufy doorbell sees a human approaching the door, and when someone presses the doorbell button. WAF=100. :sunglasses:

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I really don't understand your post. Hubitat works fantastic with local cameras, couldn't ask for better camera integration. Having said this, HE is not a device that has multiple terabytes of built in storage with the ability to record and manage camera feeds. People use a variety of other software and hardware for this task. As Hubitat prides itself on local solutions that do not require the cloud, HE integrates well with the major platforms in this arena. This includes Blue Iris, UniFi, and to a lesser extent synology.

It is important to realize that HE strives to integrate nicely with these various NVR camera recording/managing systems. In and of itself it is not a NVR system, nor should it strive to be.

It was fairly straightforward to implement the following when I first acquired my Hubitat (in no particular order):

  1. Wall Tablet goes to camera view when somebody rings the doorbell
  2. Message sent to phone if someone walks into the camera's field of view and the alarm is on
  3. If the alarm is on and someone walks into camera's field of view, and angry dog barks inside the house.
  4. Outdoor lights turn on when someone enters the camera's field of view (depending on time of day), also the lights that turn on and the order in which they turn on varies based on time of day and whether or not the night alarm is armed.

Many users implement more automations than this, the sky is really the limit. Not sure how much more a user would like.

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Blue iris - awesome.

'nuff said

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maybe the right question I should ask is: What is the plug and play camera/brand that has a decent integration with HE! .. something with sensors triggering and possibly can be added to the dashboard directly for viewing..

I personally have Arlo, Nest Cam, WYZE and I struggle to get any to work with HE, these are very popular options alongside Ring, blink, eufy ..

reading your feedback here I'm very tempted to check out,

  • Blue Iris but for the need to run a 24/7 windows machine :confused:
  • Camect seems highly rated but the price point $600-$1k is steep,

now investigating if any of Hikvision, Reolink, Ubiquiti, armcrest wifi/battery options to see if any model or brand can be integrated easily with HE..

I don't mind buying another device/hub/nvr system if it would integrate HE properly .. as long as i wouldn't need to do all the wiring thing and just keep it simple with the battery cam/wifi or so..

also found this post is relevant for ref.

Arlo, Nest and Wyze are examples of Cloud based solutions. So the problem is as i stated above that they don't generally integrate well with external systems.

I have Arlo and Eufy and you can probably use the same method i did to use them with Hubitat.

First I would suggest you consider using Smartthings as a potential cloud aggregator for integrations that don't exist or can't exist directly with Hubitat. To do this you would setup a cloud only Smartthings environment with your arlo camera. Then you can use HubiThings Replica to integrate it back to Hubitat. That integration method should allow you to integrate anything you can get from arlo other then Smart Notifications. They don't send that data outbound.

I believe WYZE has a firmware that support RSTP that can be used through a NVR software like Motion on a Always on system. That software can be setup to tell HE when a motion event is detected with Tiny Cam Connector.

I am not sure what to tell you about Nest as it depends on what methods are avaliable for it to integrate. If it can be integrated with Smartthings you may be able to use the same method as Arlo.

All of those options though aren't best in class solutions largely due to those solutions preferring subscription cloud based options.

I would suggest you look at Blue Iris and getting cameras that work with it. Blue iris has tone of options so it won't be exactly plug and play, but honestly I don't think you will find one that really is.

Dashboard viewing would likely be just pointing your dashboard to the appropriate URL. It generally isn't really a dashboard function, but your browser just opening the stream in what is called a iframe.

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Had. They pulled the very popular RTSP firmware because they hadn't updated it to keep up with other firmware updates (new devices), saying it wasn't really wanted by the community.

I was worried about that.

You can still find it if you look hard. The link at the Wyze community is gone. BUT - it is well over 12 months out of date at this point.

https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026245231-Wyze-Cam-RTSP

If it's your cup of tea, there is a docker container that serves as an intermediary and generates a rtsp stream for all your wyze cameras. I've been using it for a few months with BI and works great. Even audio works.

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Yes? it says "We have removed the firmware files for these versions for now"

I was going to post the link to this. I've not set it up but it's on my "to play with" list. It's great to hear that it's working for you -- I'll probably try to get to it soon.

If you want plug n’ play, then I also suggest Camect and your choice of IP cameras that support RTSP and/or ONVIF. Camect’s AI processing for motion events are worth its expense.

You can accomplish pretty much the same thing for less with Blue Iris but you have to roll your own hardware, keep a windows PC on all the time, and if you want AI analysis of motion you also have to configure deepstack on your own.

FWIW although I do enjoy integrating cameras with my home automation setup, I think there are plenty of people for whom this isn’t necessarily a priority.

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