I am posting this with the hope that it saves at least one person from hours of Googling. I have had BlueIris NVR for my POE security cameras for a while. Great - but I wanted to add some automations with the motion sensors. I watched many videos and read many things, but could not get the messages to pass from BI to HA.
What the problem was (and if everyone else knows this but me, apologies), is you must configure the Alerts for each camera to do the following: (Thank you ha-blueiris/blueiris-server.md at 9854117f2279805e957ade4bd64ffe68d972254e · elad-bar/ha-blueiris · GitHub for the instructions)
You must configure the action:
“On alert” to be ‘MQTT’ with:
Topic - BlueIris/&CAM/Status
Payload - { "type": "&TYPE", "trigger": "ON" }
“On reset” to be ‘MQTT’ with:
Topic - BlueIris/&CAM/Status
Payload - { "type": "&TYPE", "trigger": "OFF" }
Hope this saves a little searching for someone out there. Thank you to the YouTube videos for getting me most of the way there, and thank you to https://github.com/kramttocs for helping me close the loop