I have the Iris 1st gen indoor cameras and the Iris 2nd gen indoor/outdoor cameras made by Sercomm. These have PIR sensors. I realize that they can't link to the Hubitat, but is there a way to access and use the PIR sensors on them for motion? I am currently using the Motion application in Linux to record video and still images. However, the motion detection algorithms are less than reliable since any change triggers a motion event. Things like the flag waving or a bug flying by are enough to trigger it.
I think the PIR sensor would be more reliable, but have no clue as to whether that can be used and if so, how to do so. If anyone has gotten the sensors to work, I would like to know how.
Actually, outdoor PIR sensors are notoriously terrible. The only one that seems to be any good is the hue because it was designed for outdoor use. In the summer they don't work because everything is so hot it can't distinguish a person from the background. And in the winter, people's heat is either absorbed by the surrounding area or a gust of warm air stands out so much against the background cold, they respond to ghosts. Now, if you're in a place like Seattle that stays fairly consistent, you might be better off. But none of them work great outdoors.
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I was hoping it would be better than just the pixel change motion detection which has been unreliable also. I might as well have it recording constantly anyway since any little breeze which causes the flag to move triggers a motion event recording. I'll have to move the flag and see if I can mask off some areas to get more reliable motion detection events.
I find that image processing is much better than outdoor pir. You should look at a 3rd party program to process the video feed. There are ones out there to detect just larger people shaped objects or large objects moving through a virtual "gate" (as cars would drive up a driveway). There a bunch out there but folks on the forum seem to Like Blue Iris. Personally, I like MotionEye for raspberry pi. It's free and open source.
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I'll have to check them out. As long as they are not cloud-based, I could go for one of them. I'm leery about sending images out to who-knows-where for processing.
Edit: Blue Iris is out since I don't run Windows (except for one computer that stays off most of the time except when I need to use it for specialized embroidery machine software or a greeting card program).
I'll look at Xeoma also.
Blue Iris is the most well known but has the highest system requirements. It's local and can be integrated via Maker API for motion alerts.
For Linux my current favorite is Xeoma. It can also be integrated via scripts with Maker API and has adjustable motion detection and notifications.
One of the telephone numbers for Xeoma has a country code indicating Kazakhstan and Russia. I'll pass.
