Nest, Rachio Deer deterrent

1

I am having quite an issue with deer in my area. They have eaten and destroyed my entire landscape area in the front of my house. I have plenty of Nest cameras that trigger the “animal” motion in the middle of the night but I cannot seem to find a way to tell HA to fire my rachio-controlled sprinklers when it sees them. I see a way to do it with motion, but that is not working either. I assume because it shows “animal” vs motion in the nest app. Any ideas?

2

Is there anything in HA that tells you it’s animal versus human? That’s your trigger, to know that it was triggered and it was by an animal and it was after/before a certain time (optionally). Then you can turn on a zone with the Rachio integration.

I don’t own any Nest products so I cannot verify what sensors are active and what their values are.

3

So in the dropdown for a “trigger” in the automation it shows “person” or “motion” detected but no animal. So I think this is where the issue is. I have even tried to bypass this by telling it when the status of the camera changes from “idle” to “anything” to trigger the rachio. But nothing is working. When I test run it works fine. Just doesn’t work when the deer show up.

4

If it doesn’t work on idle to anything but works manually then it means that your automation is faulty. What does the trace tell you? This should be easy to test, just set it up and go walk in front of the Nest and see if your sprinkler starts.

6

Still not working. Running manually shows this:


id: '1716481298834'
alias: Deer deterrent
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - camera.front_yard_camera
    from: null
    to: recording
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 2
condition:
  - condition: time
    after: '23:30:00'
    before: '05:45:00'
    weekday:
      - sun
      - mon
      - tue
      - wed
      - thu
      - fri
      - sat
    enabled: false
action:
  - type: toggle
    device_id: 62fd8e726f4d78eeb63f26789fae5587
    entity_id: b41512b6195a57e86021a937acf15787
    domain: switch
mode: single

Step Config:
type: toggle
device_id: 62fd8e726f4d78eeb63f26789fae5587
entity_id: b41512b6195a57e86021a937acf15787
domain: switch

Changed Variables:
context:
id: 01HYP4DF3METPC69401WVQMWC0
parent_id: 01HYP4DF3M7P7BT8YBHTT8WMVH
user_id: null

7

Track the history of the entities so you can see what they change to and when, that will be useful to determine what the trigger needs to be. If the camera recording is really the only way of knowing if an animal triggered things and it hasn’t fired, that’s on Nest rather than HA since Nest appears to not have detected anything.

Also, as a general rule, you should not use device_id if possible and instead use entity_id’s.

1 Like
8

One tip with deer if you can: Plant Rosemary around your landscaping. Deer hate that. If not, look for other plants you can add that deer avoid.