Thought I would share this automation for a bit of a laugh.
The backstory - our property is much higher than the street and one of our beloved dogs loves to peek over the wall and bark at passers-by in the road. While this is not a problem in itself, with lockdown and work from home it can be pretty frustrating when doing calls, especially on dustbin day when there is a lot of activity in the street.
Since I had recently built a sprinkler system in my backyard using HA, I had a few extra parts and newfound skills lying around, so I decided they would make the perfect MVP to see if I could solve this problem.
My solution was as follows:
A Tuya smart switch powering a water solenoid valve hooked up to a well-positioned sprayer nozzle pointing along the area where the hounds bark from, triggered by a line crossing detection in my HIK Vision cameras.
I must admit, I did not expect this to work half as well as it did. While there is quite a delay on the system from the point of detecting movement to the time when the sprayer triggers, it’s not really been an issue.
WFH has been an absolute pleasure this week and dogs now spend more time with me in my office and less time barking at the wall. A win in my books
Anyways, enough blabber - enjoy the footage
Oh, and if anyone would like more detail on how this was all configured in HA up I’ll be happy to share the deets.
I don’t get action notification directly from Eufy but I could indirectly.
Using Tasker on my phone to react to a Eufy Notification, I could open a dashboard on my phone with a button or buttons that allow me to perform actions. In this case, I would want to spray water on annoying door-to-door salesmen although I wouldn’t. I have done this with notifications for other devices.
With Tasker, you can do that using notifications from any app. I use that to connect devices that don’t have integrations to my Hubitat setup such as Wyze Cam, Amcrest cameras, and of course Eufy. When I get motion notifications from either Wyze Cam or Amcrest cameras, Tasker sends an HTTP request to my Hubitat to change the status of virtual motion sensors on Hubitat.
I assume this could be done with Home Assistant somehow also but it’s working great on Hubitat and I had that setup 1st and like using both Hubitat & Home Assistant (and Node Red) together.
I haven’t used it yet but it looks like there is a Tasker plug-in specifically for Home Assistant so you can do a Call Service, Get State, or Render Template in Tasker on your phone.
Couldn’t find the plug in for homeassistsnt on Tasker. Can you help me find it please?
Also I was under the impression that I could update a sensor based on an android app on my android phone to home assistant as the android app for home assistant has this feature of notifications?
Can you please share your tasker file/tasks when you get a notification from eufy on your android and it opens up Hubitat I.e. configured via tasker of course.
I hear with autonotifications it’s straightforward and simple.
I love the lateral thinking! Actually I’ve used HA with HIKVision cameras to detect people close to my front door, the action does two things: sends a TTS to Alexa to announce that there is someone at the front door but also turns on the (KNX) hallway lights to welcome you home. The other reason for doing this is to make it look like there’s somebody in the house and they’re coming to the front door. This is a fantastic deterrent to potential scumbag burglars as it gives the impression of occupation. I’m going to enhanced it further by switching on other interior lights on a more randomised basis.
Actually this idea has worked already; early one morning at about 2am two scumbags arrived to attempt a theft of my car using the key relay technique. Well needless to say because of an epidemic of this kind of crime in London I have “comfort access” to my car is disabled as a security precaution, when the thief approached the front door with his relay unit the hall lights came on and at that point the scumbags aborted their mission. I have kept the whole incident on CCTV, but there was a previous incident which I didn’t save so as far as I know this has worked very effectively twice in the past year.
Simple script, but very effective!
What I’m now looking for is a method of detecting the 125kHz relay attempt close to the front door as a 100% relatable method of detection that will sound an alarm, but also a method of detecting Bluetooth MAC addresses so I can log all phones and then use this to detect other visits by the same person to search the CCTV with in case of an earlier reconnaissance visit during the day.
It’s so sad that we have to worry about this kind of thing.
This has spread from London out to Essex where I am. People go out in the morning to find the car is gone, by then it’s been stored in a container somewhere and shipped abroad or stripped for parts.
The Bluetooth tracker sounds like a good idea, most seem to need an app running on the device though, because the phones send random Mac addresses.
I really love how this thread has brought out the inner Home Alone prankster in all of us lol.
The HIK Vision cameras have worked very well, I have also used them to detect motion on the driveway at a certain time of night and then turn on some lights, but I think I will aim the sprayer in that direction too
I know that via SSH you can run one of the two following commands:
Or, if your distribution is using bluetoothctl use the following commands:
$ bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# scan on
[NEW] Controller <your Bluetooth adapter> [default]
[NEW] F8:04:33:AF:AB:A2 [TV] UE48JU6580
And this will detect BLE devices nearby. This might be impractical depending on where your HA Pi is living, but you could always set up a remote HA instance near your driveway, living in a box or something, on which you could automate this command when there is motion detected or whatever trigger it is you are using.
I have no idea how you could save the output to a log or maybe a push notification, I’m sure someone else will know more details on this.
Wow, the power of the community! I need something with an interface of some kind to interface to HA, but you’ve got me pointed in the right direction.
That’s useful, thanks. Actually I managed to get something working on an ESP-32 module, but my challenge is logging it to a Maria DB that I have set up and running. It needs someone with better programming skills than I. If then it could be used to recall video from the HIK Vision NVR we would have everything we need!
Stolen cars seem to go to Lithuania via Tilbury and then appear on eBay as parts. Search e-bay for RHD Range Rover complete interior seats door cards and you’ll see what I mean.
