How can I send an image from MQTT to the IOS App?

Third party integrations Node-RED
1

Images from my motion detecting camera application (Frigate) are being published to MQTT. I can view the image using a Node Red image tools viewer node, but I can’t figure out how to pass it to to the notify.mobile_app_iphone service.

image

I figure I need to use the “attachment” field in the Data property of the notify service, but I don’t know the exact syntax to pass the raw image to it. I have the image being passed through the flow as base64 for what it’s worth. I could change it to a buffer if needed. How can I get this image to that notify service?

Thanks!

2

Why not use the usual home assistant camera integration?

3

Frigate already provides the image via MQTT, and Frigate also adds an additional overlay that, at least for now, is useful for debugging. I don’t have my cameras added to Home Assistant at all for now. Beyond that, I’m just really curious how to get that buffer/base64 image into notify.mobile_app since I’ve been trying to figure this out for several hours now.

Where would I find documentation on what sort of JSON attributes the notify.mobile_app service supports?

4

You do realise there is an MQTT camera integration?

https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notifications-basic/ or the source.

5

For the sake of anyone stumbling across this with a similar problem (wanting to get an image from MQTT out to the IOS app) I managed to come up with a solution. It doesn’t look like it’s possible to send the image itself to the IOS app; you can only send a URL to an image. Here were the steps I used:

  1. An mqtt in node subscribes to the topic with the image and outputs it as a Base64 encoded string.
  2. A base64 node then converts this to string.
  3. A file node (not a “file in” node) writes this to the local filesystem with binary encoding. I arbitrarily chose /config/www/latestcar.png for ease of testing.
  4. (OPTIONAL) We’re sending a URL to the iPhone that the iPhone needs to be able to resolve. I didn’t want to expose my Home Assistant to the internet, so I instead upload the image I saved to /config/www/lastestcar.png to my remote webhost using node-red-contrib-ftp.
  5. Call svc: notify.mobile_app_<your device> with JSON that looks something like this:
{
    "message": "Car detected",
    "data": {
        "attachment": {
            "url": "http://YourInternetVisibleDomainHere.com/lastcar.png",
            "content-type": "png",
            "hide-thumbnail": false
        }
    }
}

image
image1113×67 8.54 KB

2 Likes
6

Wow. Thanks for this!! I just got Frigate up and running and have been trying to get the notifications working. I haven’t used Node-RED before so I guess this is my opportunity to finally jump in!