Ring Doorbell Motion - Which Event?

Third party integrations
1

I am seeing several motion-related events for my Ring Doorbell 3.

When I set up a trigger, I can choose
“Device” > “Ring Doorbell Motion started detecting motion”
“Device” > “Ring Doorbell Motion stopped detecting motion”
or
“State” > “Ring Doorbell Motion (binary_sensor.front_door_motion)”
“State” > “Ring Doorbell Last Motion (sensor.front_door_last_motion)”
and there’s a nebulous
“State” > “Ring Doorbell Last Activity (sensor.front_door_last_activity)”

Where is the documentation for what these events are? I see some Ring integration doc, and it was very unhelpful with circular references (e.g. “use the Motion event to detect motion”)

Currently, I have a trigger for “Device” > “Ring Doorbell Motion started detecting motion” and my Home Automation is triggering. But it seems to be triggering a lot of false positives.

HA will get a trigger that there’s motion, but my Android Ring app doesn’t. When I review the footage on my Ring app, it’s correct - there was nobody there. So why is the event in HA triggering to tell me somebody’s there when there isn’t? FYI, in the event when there is a real motion, both HA and my Ring app get triggered.

I have a suspicion that the normal Ring ecosphere is detecting a possible motion event, then performing some magic to determine whether it’s a false alarm. But in the HA ecosphere, I’m just getting the raw motion events w/o the post-event magic. That’s just a guess based on what I’m seeing.

2

Hi, same problem here. False positives from Home Assistant, but not from the Ring app. I use:

  trigger:
  - entity_id: binary_sensor.voordeur_motion
    from: 'off'
    platform: state
    to: 'on'

Did you find a solution for this? Thanks!

3

Nope. Never found an answer; no help here on the forums, either. One other thing I was wondering about was the “Duration” setting for the Trigger but I can’t find any documentation on what it does, especially in the context of a trigger.

I set the trigger to be “Ring Doorbell Motion started detecting motion” and added a duration of “2 seconds” - the thought being it needs to detect motion for 2 seconds before notifying me? We’ll see if that does anything.

4

Did this work for you? I’m having the same issue. I was thinking the motion sensor is triggering for anything in the whole view of the camera. But Ring is only processing the parts in the marked views. I’ve noticed that mine will trigger to someone pulling in across the parking lot from me even though my motion area is in the lower part of view right in front of my door.

5

Just checking back in to say I still have not solved this issue.

Tom’s theory really sounds plausible… In the Ring app, you can define motion detection zones. I figure either A) the app tells the Ring hardware to only send motion alerts when they happen in the defined zone, or B) the Ring hardware sends all motion alerts to the app and the app determines if they are in the defined zone and determines whether to fire the event/notifications.

If it’s option B, that would explain all the HA false positives. Motion events are being sent to both Home Assistant and the Ring app… Home Assistant can’t figure out whether the event was in a defined “zone” but the Ring app can.

I may just have to give up, because I’m getting way too many false positives in HA.

6

Ring helped me make a decision on this whole setup. My renewal was coming up and I got the email that the cost was going up again. Having two doorbell cameras I didn’t find it cost effective. So I just switched to something else and got away from them.

7

May I ask what you went with?

8

I switched to Wyze for the doorbells. I already had a couple of cameras. So going with their Wyze Cam Unlimited seemed to be the more cost effective way for me on the cloud side of it. Although Wyze doesn’t have a great direct intregration with Home Assistant, I was able to solve my issues using IFTTT as the middleman between the two systems and it’s working well for me right now. Especially with the motion detection.