Canary integration

I have just bought an used Canary cam. I though it was a cheap option to add to the living room considering it will also provide information on temp, humidity and air quality, as well as being able to serve as a simple alarm with the image trigger when movement was detected.

Following the Canary integration setup (https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/canary/) I have only been able to add camera image so far.

But I have not found any of the sensors of the camera, and also I don’t know how to work with the motion detection as I don’t see any entity that responds to that.

Can anyone provide some clarification?

Everything I see requires the canary camera to be online before it will create a single sensor…except for the ffmpeg streams. Those will just try when requested.

This is a cloud polling device. Do you see your camera on your account at https://canary.is/?

Yes, everything is configured and the Canary app works fine and shows all the sensors information

Do you have the original model (now called Pro) or the cheaper one (now called View)? The cheaper model doesn’t have Ethernet and also no temperature or humidity sensors. So you wont see those.

The streams you can access in HA are also pretty useless, as the actual stream is just the playback of the last motion detection. You cannot use it for live viewing.

You also have to be careful when enabling and disabling the alarm component from HA. If you do it to frequently, it will stop working and you need to restart the component (e.g. restart HA). Also enabling or disabling the alarm from the app, doesnt seem to reflect in HA, and it can get out of sync.

All around, its not a great system. I still keep mine for now, but I going to move to a local solution eventually.

Yes, it’s the pro with Ethernet.

I thought I could use it for live streaming… crap, I wanted to changes my current setup adding the other sensors (and the Canary looks good, too).

I thought that Homer Assistant could solve the whole Canary fiasco of some years ago…

I pretty much only use the HA component for enabling/disabling the alarm.

I have a template alarm which uses motion sensors for triggering, and then use presence detection for turning it on and off as I come and go. I have a second step that then enables or disables the canary alarm in lock step so I do get notifications of motion when the house is empty. I’ve disabled the auto-enable/disable in the canary app for reasons as mentioned above (getting out of sync).

Otherwise the rest of it I don’t use in HA anymore. I still use the Canary app for viewing video playback of motion alarms or if the HA motion sensors go off.

The video thing took me a while to work out what was going on, as it always seemed minutes or hours behind and I thought it was doing some sort of weird buffering. But then I noticed it was only every showing the last motion sensed video recording, and no matter what you couldn’t get any non-motion sensed or “live” video from it. That was a bit disappointing. It also seems to be really flaky, sometimes the video will play, sometimes not and then it won’t work again until you restart HA.

Thanks. It seems that Canary after all is a bad solution, with or without Home Assistant…

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