So I’ve gotten my HA Yellow set up, and the first thing was to move lights from Hue and other bridges. That seems to be going well with built-in Zigbee on Yellow taking over the lights.
Next, I want to move cameras onto it. I have a couple of Ring and Eufy cameras but I’m not sure how to get started. Lights work on Zigbee and easy to integrate and automate. But I have Ring and Eufy apps on the camera to monitor or add cameras. How does this work with HA? How do I add cameras and where do I view their feed?
If you don’t have an NAS-NVR that is compatible with HA you can look at frigate.
I currently use a synology nas as my NVR and pull the camera entities from it to my HA instance for the hikvision and hilook onvif camera’s I have setup.
Thanks. So I do have a Synology. Would love to know what you installed on the Synology for NVR and then how did you integrate with HA. Completely new at this but any links that help with this would be great.
I’ll look into HiKVision cameras. What about the doorbell? Also, what app on the mobile do you use to get notifications of doorbell or view camera feeds?
That is the integration that is setup to pull the sensors and camera entities into home assistant from the NAS.
Synology comes with Surveillance Station that is installed on the NAS to provide NVR capabilites and you just add any compatible camera to it (only downside is first 2 camera feeds are free then you need a license per camera you want to setup with the NVR install).
My front door camera is used as the camera for my doorbell button (a shelly button 1 currently) and I have the following setup in the data field of the notification call service action to capture an image and send it to my android phone:
sticky: true
notification_icon: mdi:doorbell
color: green
image: /api/camera_proxy/camera.front_door
channel: doorbell
actions:
- action: URI
title: Open Camera
uri: /lovelace/cctv
To make sure sounds are played for the alerts consistently I use tasker to set the volume on the phone, play the sound then mute the phone again using the title as a trigger.
iOS allows live feeds in the actionable notifications and its easier to have control of the companion app channel alert criticality but not on android at this time.
For the feeds I also have the surveillance center windows client installed on the nuc that is hosting the home assistant VM in headless mode in full screen and just have an action in the automation to turn on the dedicated monitor when the doorbell button is pressed and turn it off after a set time.
I also have a dedicated button to toggle it on and off as needed on my streamdeck xl:
For the app I use DS Cam from synology to view the motion detected events when needed and use openvpn setup through my main router to connect back home into my network to control and manage things that way when needed.
Thanks to all the responses here. What I’m trying to understand is how I can remotely monitor cameras at home if I am out of town or something. Would it be better to leave them connected to the Ring app or are there advantages to moving them to HA?
You can still have them connected to the app on the phone, like I said in my last reply I use the DS Cam app that is for my NAS and use OpenVPN to get access to my internal network when not home.
Integration into HA is just letting you create automation’s based on what you need them to activate and send the image data to at the time, i.e if you want to cast to more than one display at the time via full screen or pop up notification when you are home or set off a siren when not home and specific sensors detect unwanted entry.
