My setup - Hassio running on raspberry pi 2 model B .
I bought 4 teckin indoor cameras. They were just too cheap to pass up ( £52 for 4 ) . With a 16gb sd card, they are, so far, storing 5 days worth of video ( waiting for them to loop ).
However thats not why i bought them. I’m frustrated with how these cheap google and amazon capable cameras and wifi motion detectors ( tuya / smartlife ) do not offer any motion detection triggering outside of notifications in their respective apps.
I’m a big fan of deterrents when it comes to home security. I have setup my outdoor blinks to trigger my homeassistant automation to turn on all my downstairs lights and stream a barking dog mp3 to all my downstairs google home devices ( duck dns ), between the hours of 11pm and 7am.
I wasn’t prepared to fork out for the blink indoor cameras ( especially if integration support stops ), so when i saw cheap teckins at £13 per camera on a lightning deal, it was too good to pass up…only problem was i knew these things would not let me trigger automations easily as their motion detection alerts would be limited to push notification…i figured there had to be a way.
My phone is key to my home assistant solution, and I use the nfc tag feature to set alarms and switch everything off at night, so I figured i should be able to trigger on push notification on my phone.
Bit of googling brought me to pushbullet and true enough, the code exists in homeassistant to hook into the pushbullet notification mirroring on my phone using the pushbullet app and account API key. First i had to fix the listener.py in the latest version of home assistant.
I set the cheap teckin indoor cameras motion detection schedule from midnight to 6am, and set pushbullet on my phone to only mirror push notifications from the Teckin App ( i could enable more Apps if i got other cheap devices ). My automation in HA is set to trigger on a change to the pushbullet state, and matching a particular attribute ( notification text specific to the teckin cameras motion detection ). It is set to only trigger on messages of type “mirror”, so that there are no triggering on notification dismisses. If the cameras detect motion, the HA automation ( lights only , no barking dog) gets triggered within 10 - 20 seconds.
I also setup a test pushbullet job to ensure mirroring is up and running and HA is listening…i have a different app that sends a push notification to my phone, and a seperate automation that triggers on that to send a home assistant notification to my phone. This way I know pushbullet is mirroring and home assistant is listening without messing with the cameras.
So far so good. Only downside is if my phone is off / dead, the solution does not work…however, that is going to be a rare occurrence, additionally you could install pushbullet on a spare phone, always plugged in or on an android tv box.
If anyone needs any help with similar, hit me up and i’ll share any relevant bits.
