Hi all! I’m one of the developers behind Guardian Eye — a native desktop NVR for Windows,
macOS, and Linux.
With the 3.4.0 release, we completely overhauled our Home Assistant integration and open-
sourced our companion Lovelace dashboard, so I wanted to share it here.
What arrives in Home Assistant via MQTT discovery
Everything auto-discovers cleanly: one device per camera, plus a dedicated device for the
NVR host:
• Camera Entities: Motion and tamper sensors, power switch, recording state/mode select,
snapshot images, event entity, and an AI detection sensor (label, confidence score, and
timestamped snapshot).
• Context-Aware Controls: PTZ controls and image settings only appear if the camera actually
supports them — no useless dummy buttons.
• Diagnostics & Telemetry: FPS, stream uptime, last frame latency, reconnect counters, plus
host CPU & GPU telemetry and pipeline state.
• Proper State Handling: If the NVR stops, entities cleanly switch to unavailable rather
than freezing with stale data.
• Automation-friendly Zones: Detection zones are passed as attributes on the AI sensor.
Writing a template like “person in driveway” takes a single condition instead of managing
separate entities for every zone.
The Lovelace Dashboard (MIT)
We built a custom card that automatically picks up all discovered MQTT entities — zero YAML
or entity ID copy-pasting required:
• NVR overview card at the top + individual camera cards.
• Automatically syncs with your app’s display language.
• Just add the JavaScript module to your Lovelace resources.
1-Minute Setup
- Set up any MQTT broker (the Mosquitto add-on works out of the box).
- Open Guardian Eye: Settings → Home Assistant.
- Click “Find Broker” (uses mDNS to detect host/port, including Docker setups).
- Test connection, keep the default discovery prefix (homeassistant), and save.
Discovery is automatically republished on reconnects and broker restarts. Self-signed TLS
certificates are supported with a warning.
• Step-by-step guide with screenshots: https://getguardianeye.com/blog/home-assistant-
guardian-eye-setup
• Dashboard GitHub: GitHub - guardianeye-labs/Guardian.Eye.Dashboard: Guardian Eye NVR dashboard for Home Assistant · GitHub
Full transparency on scope:
Guardian Eye is a standalone desktop application, not a headless Docker container. The free
tier covers 1 camera, while multi-camera tiers are one-time lifetime purchases. If your
setup is strictly headless server/Docker-only, this probably isn’t for you.
I’d love to get your feedback: which entities do you use most in your automations, and what
is currently missing? Happy to answer any questions here!
