Motion Detection with Amcrest

The setup of the basic Amcrest Wifi camera does require a non-HA interface to initially set up. In my case, I used their app on my Android phone. My experience was straightforward - Add a Device, walk through their steps. Done.

Adding it to Home Assistant was more interesting.

This is added to your base configuration file

 

If you've read my previous entries, using the !secret can be skipped if you just want to leave the host IP, username, and password in your configuration file. If you don't care about motion sensor triggers, you can skip those last two lines.

Once you restart Home Assistant, BackdoorAmcrest will be visible as an entity.

What I wanted though - if there's something triggering the motion sensor...I don't just want to record it for later, I want to know about it. So I go to Node Red.

Two parts: the trigger & the notification

You'll notice "motion-detected" is a binary sensor, which means true/false. If you had set up the motion-detected sensor in a Lovelace, it says "Clear" (false) or "Detected" (true). When we build the trigger, we'll need to keep that in mind.

Before you build the notify, make sure you've added your phone to HA.

Once you deploy (saving your flow) in Node Red, movement at your camera should now trigger your phone.