Hello there!
With the reolink integration I have managed to get my camera into home assistant and several entities are showing up. However I was not able to find any solution to create a new snapshot entity that delivers a new picture whenever a movement (from a different sensor) is detected. With the service Camera: Take snapshot I was only able to create .jpg-files that go into a certain folder, but no entity that refreshes on its own.
Any hints?
Thank you very much!
What is the end use case for this “camera”?
Sending notifications?
A card on a dashboard?
Neither require a camera entity.
The end use case for all this is to reduce data traffic when streaming the new camera entity to another remote home assistant server.
You could use a generic camera or you could use a triggered template image that is triggered by a file sensor.
How often are you taking snapshots?
I assume the snapshot is always saved with the same filename?
That would make things a lot easier.
If I understand what you’re trying to do, you’d need to use an automation.
The automation would fire upon motion detection, and then the action would be to call the camera: take snapshot service.
Then you can do whatever you want with that jpg file afterwards. I send it in a push notification to the companion app.
Thank you very much, made good progress with the generic camera integration, that now “converts” the .jpg from the snapshot-automation into an entity. This entity now gets a new image approximately 30 times a day.
There is one point though that does not work as expected. Although the snapshot is visible on the dashboard, the picture is not displayed in larger format when clicking on the entity card. This seems to be some kind of a browser thing, because for me it only happens in Safari (not on Chrome and not on iOS). I did some research and found some discussions about this from years ago but no solution.
Sounds like a browser issue to me. Yet another reason I hate apple… Lol