I am just starting my journey with Home Assistant so I am sorry if the question is noobish/obvious.
I own an Amcrest IP camera (IP2M-841W) and I would like to add some automation with its motion detection.
I have successfully connected it to HA, enabled motion detection, and named it camera1.
I was able to create simple automation for sending notification (persistant_notification) once motion is detected.
I would like to create an automation for taking a snapshot (image) once motion is detected. When I try to add the action: camera.snapshot service for the automation nothing works. I added the filename configuration under /tmp and added /tmp to whitelist_external_dirs.
From reading the services available for Amcrest (https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/amcrest/#services) I see that snapshot is not there.
My question is, is it really the case that snapshots are not available? am I doing something wrong?
Can we see your automation… snapshot is a service of any camera that’s already being fed into HA as far as I know. I use Amcrest cameras and receive snapshots daily…
Nothing really standing out as wrong… for mine I had to list the entire path… but I’m pretty sure that that is not normal, and something is not right with my setup that I have to do that… but maybe you want to try it anyway. (also have entire path in whitelist)
- alias: Front Yard Camera Motion Snapshot
trigger:
- entity_id: binary_sensor.front_yard_motion
platform: state
from: 'off'
to: 'on'
action:
- service: camera.snapshot
data:
entity_id: camera.front_yard
filename: "/home/homeassistant/.homeassistant/www/cam_captures/front/{{ as_timestamp(states.automation.front_yard_camera_motion_snapshot.attributes.last_triggered)|timestamp_custom('%Y_%m_%d__%H_%M_%S') }}.jpg"
No it shouldn’t be but maybe worth trying to actual full path… like I said I don’t know that it’s normal that I have to do that… as many docs just show the path under the config dir… but maybe you have a similar issue… without it my snapshots never saved and I believe the error log was giving me a message about not being able to save (it was awhile ago now)… did you check for errors after triggering the automation?
@Bartem Thank you very much for your help, appreciate it!
Eventually I changed the path to be under /share and rebooted the machine and I was able to take a screenshot!