I’ve spent the past eight months building Aevocam, a service for long-term photographic monitoring. It’s a production system now, but still a new one. I’m continuing to expand what it can do while looking for opportunities to get it into more real-world setups.
You can think of a camera feed as timelapse photography: take still photos from a fixed camera over months or years to build a visual record of change. But rather than just producing a timelapse video, Aevocam keeps the individual photos accessible so you can move through that history, compare different points in time, and examine changes at your own pace. I’ve already tested with tens of thousands of photos. The UI for forward and reverse playback or scrubbing through it is super fast and smooth.
I originally built Aevocam around FTP uploads, since quite a few IP cameras can periodically upload snapshots that way. But FTP can be awkward to configure and limits supported cameras.
I started tinkering with Home Assistant recently and realized it offered a much cleaner approach. HA already knows how to talk to an enormous range of cameras. So I built this new integration.
The integration
Each Aevocam device maps an existing Home Assistant camera entity to an Aevocam feed. Home Assistant then becomes a very flexible way to decide when that camera should contribute a photo to the long-term record.
- Create whatever snapshot schedule makes sense. Take a photo every hour, once a day, only during daylight, on certain days, or build more elaborate schedules using HA’s automation system.
- Use other HA data to make the schedule smarter. For example, skip nighttime photos, photograph a construction site only on weekdays, or vary the schedule by season. Aevocam is designed primarily for this kind of periodic, long-term photography rather than high-frequency event recording.
- Configure it through the UI. Each camera/feed connection gets an Upload snapshot button that can be used manually or from automations. No YAML is required for basic setup.
The integration is open source, MIT licensed, and can be installed through HACS as a custom repository or manually.
Aevocam
I’m the developer behind Aevocam as well as this integration. This is my first Home Assistant integration. I’ve been using it with my own HA setup at home, but I’m very interested in getting it onto some other people’s systems and finding out what I’ve missed.
The integration itself is free. Aevocam is a hosted paid service, so I want to be upfront about that. The base subscription is $50/month and includes a $40/month allowance toward ingestion and storage. For modest home use, that allowance can go a long way. For example, four cameras each storing one 1080p photo per day could run for more than 13 years before the monthly bill rises above the base subscription. Heavier use (more cameras, more frequent snapshots, higher resolutions, or longer retention) eventually becomes usage-based.
I want to keep this post short. Here’s more info about this new integration and Aevocam generally:
I’d particularly appreciate feedback from people willing to try it with camera brands and HA setups different from mine. Bug reports, criticism of how I’ve structured the integration, and suggestions for making it behave more naturally within Home Assistant are all welcome.