Ubiquiti Unifi Protect cameras

signal15 · June 19, 2019, 1:20am

Anyone get anything integrated with Hubitat for these?

I bought a Synology NAS specifically because of the Surveillance Station software. NOWHERE in the description does it say I need to buy licenses for additional cameras. $50 per camera. Screw those guys. I just picked up a Unifi Cloud Key Gen2 Pro which has a 1TB hard drive and an integrated NVR. Yes, you have to use their cameras. Since I needed new cameras anyway, the cost difference was a wash and the Unifi Protect NVR interface is way better than the Synology one.

I was thinking of a few scenarios where an integration would be cool:

Motion sensing alerts from the cameras to trigger things
Automatically pipe the audio from the cams to the whole house audio system when someone walks up to the front door.
Automatically pause any playing video on TV's and display the cams

robert1 · June 20, 2019, 7:09am

I’ve got the same gear, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to do much. It’s pretty locked down. So far, you might be able to get the RTSP stream hooked in, but everything else isn’t documented.

But let me know if you get anywhere with it! You can get UniFi video to run in a docker container on the synology nas. I was going to do that but got lazy and went cloudkey 2

epj3 · June 20, 2019, 10:48am

This is my impression as well. It's a shame, but at the same time, it doesn't really make a difference in my use case because I don't really see much advantage to integrating the cameras with Hubitat. Great cameras and NVR (Cloud Key Gen 2 Pro), though.

robert1 · June 20, 2019, 11:35am

In the end, if I get a motion alert, I can fire up the protect app in 10 seconds. Waiting for camera integration in home automation is an exercise in frustration.

CrisD · June 22, 2019, 3:40am

If I get a motion alert, I can go to my dashboard and check what is going on, and turn on lights, etc. I have Unifi Protect also. This is using rtsp, and only works on the local network.

david4 · November 11, 2019, 11:01pm

Cris, Would you mind providing a brief description of how you feed Unifi video into your dashboard?

Thanks!

greg4 · November 20, 2019, 7:03pm

I would love to know the same thing. Been trying to figure out how to incorporate RTSP feeds without success so far. Not much info and this is the first successful implementation I’ve read about. Please share how you accomplished this!

zarthan · November 20, 2019, 9:00pm

You can't get a video feed to the Dashboard. What you can get is a still image and set it to refresh at 1 second intervals. Your camera must support something like a snapshot url which can be displayed using the Dashboard Link in a new dashboard tile. This only works for local access. It will not work for the Cloud Dashboards.

greg4 · November 21, 2019, 1:09am

I can work with that. Do I have to setup a virtual device or something like that to get a tile?

CrisD · November 21, 2019, 1:56am

CrisD · November 21, 2019, 1:59am

In your cameras settings you need to enable RTSP and get the IP address. Add the snap.jpeg at the end and put it in an image tile. 1 second refresh, and it only works when you are on your local network.

greg4 · November 21, 2019, 2:09am

Thanks Cris. I really appreciate the reply. Looks far simpler than I was making it.

So far it’s not working but I’ve got the tile made as you described so I’ll keep tinkering.

Thanks again!!

CrisD · November 21, 2019, 2:13am

And enable Anonymous Snapshot in your cameras settings.

greg4 · November 21, 2019, 2:36am

Hmm. I’ve never seen that option before.

CrisD · November 21, 2019, 2:48am

You have to go to your cameras IP address directly.

greg4 · November 21, 2019, 1:39pm

Ahh, got it. I've always managed the cameras via Unifi Protect and didn't realize there were settings not available that way.

So after a lot of fussing in trying to figure out the password to log into each camera directly I got it to work. Thank you for taking the time to note the steps.

epj3 · November 21, 2019, 5:46pm

I tried this and will add the steps to figure out the password for anyone else doing the same. See here -- just SSH into your cloudkey/NVR and obtain the password with

psql -U unifi-protect

then

SELECT "devicePassword" FROM nvrs;

greg4 · November 21, 2019, 6:00pm

You can also just log into Unifi Protect and go to the settings page. Scroll to the bottom and under the Advanced section you will see "Device Password". Just click on 'Reveal" and it will show you the password used for all you cameras. the user name is UBNT.

signal15 · November 22, 2019, 2:03am

What I'd really love to do with these is somehow take images with faces and automatically do face recognition via Azure or AWS, or license plate OCR via Azure or AWS. Then send that data back to HE so I have announcements like "Steve is at the front door" or "An unknown car pulled into the driveway."

This Unifi Protect setup is awesome. I'm SO happy with these, and I've tried a lot of different things over the past 10+ years. At one point I had several Lumenera cams that cost around $2k each (used them at work for a project and I got them for free). This setup is better.

epj3 · December 16, 2019, 6:19pm

Since this was probably on the wishlist for others who have already invested in Unifi cameras, it looks like Ubiquiti will soon sell a Wifi doorbell camera. This will up my interest in having some sort of integration with HE.