Everstra Hub — get what your Axis camera knows into Home Assistant (over MQTT)
Hi all, I’m the guy behind Everstra — a few small apps that run directly on Axis cameras. This one’s really made for Home Assistant, so I’ll keep the rest short.
HA already pulls a couple of things from an Axis cam by itself. Hub goes way further. It runs on the camera as an app and publishes over MQTT with discovery, so the entities just show up, you don’t have to hand-configure them. And it reads out whatever the camera actually exposes, dynamically per model — temperatures, CPU, uptime, network, stream state, view areas, image settings, and PTZ if the camera has it. What your camera has shows up, what it doesn’t just isn’t there. You pick per value what actually goes to HA, nothing gets dumped on you, and the sensitive stuff (serial etc) stays off unless you switch it on yourself.
The bit I think you’ll like: it works both ways. Hub can also write back into the camera. So from an automation you can flip day/night, change sharpness/contrast/exposure, or start/stop a stream or a recording job. Writing is off by default and you enable it per value — pointing an automation at your camera settings should be on purpose, not by accident.
And that’s where it gets interesting, because now your sensors and your logic meet the camera:
- motion/radar/PIR sensor in HA fires → camera starts a recording or a stream, quiet for a few min → off again
- camera gets hot (Hub gives you the temp) → HA kicks on a fan or pings you
- a physical button here → streams start on cameras in other cities all at once. That one leans on Tailscale, the camera reaches your broker over the tailnet so “across sites” is just… normal. (That Tailscale ACAP isn’t my work by the way, it’s a separate thing from another dev — Mo3he/Axis_Cam_Tailscale on github.)
The automation itself always lives in HA. Hub just gives you the building blocks, the sensors and the switches, and you wire it up however you want.
Security, since people here always ask: MQTT over TLS (own bundled LibreSSL), cert verification on by default, and you can upload your own CA for a self-signed Mosquitto, which is the normal HA setup anyway. Nothing leaves the camera except to a broker you set yourself.
Honest part: the setup (TLS cert, Tailscale proxy, Mosquitto) takes a bit of fiddling, so I wrote a full step-by-step with screenshots. And PTZ control specifically I haven’t tested on real PTZ hardware yet — it’s built to work dynamically but I’ll confirm it properly once the PTZ cam gets here.
Free, one licence per camera. It runs on the camera itself so it’s not a HACS integration — it just turns up in HA through MQTT discovery.
Setup guide: Everstra Hub — Setup guide
everstra.com
If you run HA with Axis cams I’d really like to hear what you’d do with it, honestly can’t guess all the combos people will come up with.
