Good evening, all, this is one of my first posts in the Home Assistant Community, I have a HA Green I setup and have been loving it since early November 2024, so I have a somewhat decent understanding of it and before that I was using Apple Home for 7+ years.
I bought two Aqara G5 Pro POE cameras & I have one sitting my ‘lab’ aka basement Utility room until I mount it outside and run the cat6 cable (and yes the clear plastic is still on it).
Here is my question, I just got two Aqara G5 Pro POE cameras and I have them installed in the Aqara app with the firmware updated and in Apple Home.
What is the best way to add them to HA?
Please let me know if I missed any information that could help.
thanks for you patience and help in advance!
Jonathan
I am in a similar boat. All of my devices and automations are in HA, but I use Apple Home for HomeKit Secure Video. So it is important to me to be able to add my cameras to Apple Home.
You should be able to add them via the HomeKit Device integration, but you would have to first remove them from HomeKit and at that point you no longer have Secure Video. Personally, I decided I would rather have Secure Video and miss out on the sensors in HA so I left my 2 G3 Aqara cameras in Apple Home. But it sucks. And this is the reason I am in zero hurry to purchase the G5 cameras.
If and when Matter start supporting cameras, I imagine we’ll be able to add these Aqara cameras to HA that way. Maybe someone smarter than me will chime in with another option, but there are none that I am aware of for now.
Welp, I just discovered this. If you connect through Matter, you can then push events and scenes into HA. I just added person detection sensors to HA and they work perfectly.
I have tried to find the same settings but I find the Aqara app to be a bit confusing with this being my first device in there. Where do you get to configure this?
Hi Mike, this is what I came up with after some pondering .
The G5 camera is in my Aqara and still natively added to Apple Home so I don’t lose my HKSV which I obviously like a lot.
But what I did to get them into HA was used Scrypted. I added RTSP stream to Scrypted then used the Apple HomeKit plugin in Scrypted and used the HK code to add them in HA via the ‘HomeKit Device’ bridge, cause all I wanted was live view in HA.
I have it recording in HK and using the onboard HDD in the camera locally via the Aqara app.
That was a good idea to use Scrypted. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for when adding the camera into HA. Personally, I don’t care about video feeds in HA. Only sensors, switches, automations, etc.
How do you like the G5? I’m considering picking up a couple to replace my old beat-up Arlo cameras.
I like them a lot so far! I bought the POE version so the connections are rock solid and so fast. It’s recording motion clips with onboard HDD in 1520p and on Apple HKSV at 1080p. These replaced my 2021 Logitech circle view 2 cameras outside, those had color night vision as well but these are even better color night vision.
Has anyone been able to get all the different “detection” sensors (motion, package, people, etc) to show up in HA? I have add the g5Pro into HK, HA, and Aqaras app, and the level of detail that’s in the Aqara app is super impressive, but I can’t do anything with it for automations without those sensors being in HA. Any advice?
Check out the screenshots I posted earlier in this thread.
Adding sensors is not super intuitive. You need to connect the camera to HA using Matter. Once connected, you can add individual sensors and scenes from the Aqara app.
Go to Profile
Connect to Ecosystems
Home Assistant
Scene and Signal Sync (mine says “Limited Trial” so it is possible you may not have this?)
Once here, go to Signal Management and select the devices/sensors you are going to want in HA. Again, not intuitive, but add the sensor as an “IF” condition. Then give it a name and and make sure Add to Matter is selected. Then save.
Then go to Signal Sync and select the signal you just created. This step seems to happen happen on its own for me, but it doesn’t hurt to verify.
After that, it will automagically show up in HA under your Matter integration. Not under the Aqara integration.
One more little gotcha that I forgot to mention. In the Aqara app under your camera, you need to make sure you have the particular sensors you want enabled. Otherwise it will never trigger.
I got them to work and show up under Matter. They only change the status for a second and then jump back to Clear after the initial sensor is triggered. Is there a way to have the sensors stay active after the initial trigger?
Hello when you mentioned ellipses at top right, I don’t see any ellipses only the 3 dots … ate top right corner
Can you please share a phot about the ellipses ?
until I mount it outside and run the cat6 cable (and yes the clear plastic is still on it).
.
