Hi,
before I get to my question, let me briefly explain my current setup and what I would like to achieve. My HA instance is currently accessible from the internet by forwarding port 443 to Nginx and then to HA. I have cameras all around my house with motion detection. Currently, when motion is detected, the respective camera takes a snapshot and saves it to the www folder of HA. Then HA sends a notification to my iOS devices which includes a URL to this snapshot, which is then displayed right in the notification so that I can immediately see what is going on.
Now here is the problem: Actually, my current setup works like a charm but I would like to get rid of the port forwarding and switch to Nabu Casa. However, I have no idea how to get access to the snapshots of my cameras in this setup. Does anybody have an idea how to solve this? Of course, I could setup a cloud webserver just for the snapshots and upload the snapshots to this webserver. But this seems kind of complicated. But really any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks!
I have a similar setup (cameras with motion, and snapshot notification).
To allow the images to be sent to my phone I setup a VPN on my router and have a client running on my phone. This allowed me to always be connected to my home network whether I am on WIFI or mobile data. Since my phone is connected to the home network, I can use the local path without any issue.
As an added bonus, I also added a PiHole container to my server - so now I have adblocking everywhere I go on my phone (as long as I leave the VPN connected).
I am no expert - there could be downsides to this setup (so far my only issue is connection is a little slower due to the extra hops). If anyone knows of a severe flaw in this setup I’m all ears!
DeadEnd
Thanks for the suggestion! However, the downside with VPN is, that I would always have to enable the VPN connection manually when I leave the house. This is a hassle which I would like to avoid.
True - I actually leave mine on all the time… even when I am home… I know it is not efficient, but it still works and makes it so I don’t have to turn it on and off all the time.
Alternatively you can use something like Tasker to automate turning VPN on and off. I tried this (on when WIFI is not home network, off when connected to home WIFI) but for some reason it was not reliable - probably due to sleep on android.
Anyway, I just the leave my phones VPN on all the time.
DeadEnd
Can you not include the snapshot file directly in the message without needing to go to a url in HA?
That’s the way I do it with pushbullet. My camera takes a snapshot on a motion event and saves it to a file. Then the automation sends a pushbullet notification that includes the snapshot picture right in the message of the notification.