Reolink (A Series) person & vehicle detection with pre and post event video

Third party integrations
1

It’s been one year since I started a little project. I bought a couple of reolink cameras with people and vehicle detection integrated and wondered if I can use that directly without having to rely on deepstack.
It basically was just a fun project as I knew even if I can use it, it might not be very precise. Now one year later I am quite happy with the solution I have, even thought the implementation could be better.

I had several goals with the implementation:

  • detect persons and get a recording
  • prevent unnecessary writes to my storage (I only have SSDs here which wear down to quickly if you write to them non stop
  • the recording should include a certain amount of time before the actual event

I wrote a small custom addon which can be used in conjunction with node red to realize the above mentioned goals. With just one issue I cannot solve as this is a limitation of the reolink cameras. I have to poll for the detection state.
I now get a notification including a picture (almost instant) and video (when the recording finishes) and so far it has been working very well. with the recent software updates for the reolink it did improve as the initial one 14 months ago did not include much settings for the detection (no zones, no sizes).

If there is enough interest I can share what I have so far any maybe there’s someone who could build up on this an improve it. I sadly haven’t had the time to do so and since it worked I was happy as it is. I have it running on a Raspi 4b with 4GB of RAM and can handle up to 3 cameras with high resolution, more if you switch to standard resolution or if more RAM is available.

Btw. Reolink was very helpful and when I contacted them about the api as initially it did not include the detection and they kindly expanded it. So thumbs up for that. Sadly my request to integrate mqtt into their products was turned down. But I would not rule it out completely.

I currently have a couple of RLC-510A, RLC-810A and RLC-820A in use. Nightvision is not as good but person detection still works but then I also do not use the IR lights as this attracts spiders and I don’t like cleaning the cameras every two weeks :wink:

2

Hey @CloudySky ,
I’ve tried the reolink cameras with person detection one year ago. At that time I wasn’t able to get a person detection event in HA: I’ve also tried to get the event from the Synology Surveillance Station, but that was passing all events to the Synology, unless you’ve selected the “Push notification” in the reolink app. In this case your are getting only the events of the selected type (eg Person). But you are getting also the events through the app.
Has this been solved? Are you getting event in HA?
Thnaks
R

3

I actually would be very interested in seeing what you’ve come up with. I’m relatively new to HA and this functionality is exactly what I was hoping to achieve. I’m actually really surprised in all my googling I haven’t found it yet, it seems like the natural combination of using the Reolink built in person detection without the extras of running Frigate or buying the Reolink NVR.

So yes, I’d love to see what you have so far. Thanks!

1 Like
4

The current reolink integration supports the person detection but on my RBPi it lags a bit behind. I use node red to query the Reolink API every 500ms. Not a nice solution but works reliable so far.
You could also just add a polling sensor i.E.

- platform: rest
  resource: http://192.168.???.???/cgi-bin/api.cgi?cmd=GetAiState&channel=0&user=xxxx&password=yyyy
  method: GET
  name: "Person detected by camera XYZ"
  device_class: motion
  scan_interval: 0.5
  value_template: >
    {% if value_json[0].value.people.alarm_state == 1 %}
      true
    {% else %}
      false
    {% endif %}

But I guess the reply is a bit late. I didn’t notice the notification for this thread.

1 Like