The Jimmerness - Adventures in Home Automation

 I managed to set up motion detection previously. Currently, there's a live feed of the camera on Home Assistant, as well as my Synology NAS. My NAS also saves 10 seconds around the motion event trigger - if I get a home assistant motion detection alert on my phone (or on my watch through my phone), I can boot up a connection on my NAS, browse over to security feed, look at the timeline...but that's time. If I'm asleep in bed, it's kind of crazy to boot up your computer just for that. There were different solutions for this - the Amcrest app or Home Assistant solutions through Node Red and/or automations. I want to keep solutions in-house as much as possible, so that left Node Red and automations. You will need to have the home assistant app installed on your phone. I hit a roadblock fairly early and often...how do I identify the picture taken, where is it stored, and how to send it. This solution came up as I was looking at blueprints for something else. Honestly, it w...

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 ...