Starling Home Hub integration

Feature Requests
1

Unfortunately I made the dumb decision to but into the nest ecosystem before I got wise to the existance of home assistant / the fact nest service sucks since google bought it up. My setup includes some nest protect Smoke / CO alarms, Thermostat, Nest Outdoor cams, indoor cam and also a nest hello doorbell.

Now, while there is a ā€œworkingā€ nest integration already on HA, theres something better out there.

The Starling home hub is a tiny device that sits on the network, originally designed to bridge the gap between google nest and apple homekit - theyā€™ve developed a smashing bridge between the two ecosystems, going as far to include airplay compatability to nest minis / hubs. Check the link for details. In a recent update, the starling team opened up access to their API which i wonder now if it can be used to bring the same amazing integrations from Nest into Home assistant?

I have a janky work around at present by pairing starling with HA under the HomeKit controller integration but some features are missing / messy

Is there anone with the knowhow able to develop on the Starling API and get a working integration for nest products once and for all?

2

i second this! am not a developer, but would be more than happy to help test if anyone wants to look into getting this up and running :slight_smile:

PS. not to hijack your thread or anything @nickroberts174 but iā€™m having some weird stuff happen with my Starling hub in HA - just wondering if you might have experienced something similar?

3

@milkplus, I found the same thing, didnt slow my HA down though - Assuming you have a nest hello Doorbell, each of those sensors is a familiar face that it knows! I think theres a way to un-expose those ā€˜sensorsā€™ in Starling. Alternatively, you can bulk select them and set them inactrive in HA

4

Any key working on a native Starling Home Hub integration that uses the Starling api? I have my starling hub connected directly to my Apple Home with HomeKit and thus can not connect to Home Assistant with HomeKit controller.

1 Like
5

I was able to get this to work just now by removing the hub from the Apple Home app. The Homekit Controller (Starling Hub) just showed up as discoverable in Home Assistant.

I canā€™t get the Nest x Yale lock to go back to HomeKit, thoughā€¦

6

I tried the same way. Removes Starling from apple homekit and added them back to HA using homekit controller. I can see all the cameras in ha but i wanted to get them in apple homekit too. It does show the 10s snapshots but i dont see the live view. What am I missing??

1 Like
7

I have been meaning to add them to frigate through RTSP or similar

1 Like
8

I have a Starling Home Hub and no Apple devices; I got it specifically to integrate my existing Nest Protects and Nest Ɨ Yale Lock into Home Assistant, but actually prefer its exposing of the Nest Thermostat over HomeKit to the official Nest integration as well. Iā€™ve been very happy with it except when it comes to cameras, as the performance is just bad; laggy feeds, low framerate, frequently outdated, etc. which apparently is not uncommon with cameras in Home Assistantā€¦ but I digress.

I reached out to Starling to thank them for a great product, and to ask if they could provide any pointers for the Home Assistant community when it comes to integrating Nest cameras into Home Assistant via their hub. Here is what they (Adrian) had to say (emphases mine):

Starling Home Hubā€™s HomeKit video stream is pretty standard (HomeKit video requirements are very constrained, so all HomeKit streams from all cameras will use the same audio and video encoding protocols and parameters). If camera streaming works fine in ā€˜realā€™ HomeKit but you have issues with Home Assistant, then itā€™s definitely a Home Assistant-side issue (or maybe, more specifically, with HomeKit Controller for Home Assistant) and so unfortunately weā€™re not really able to help, as we donā€™t use / canā€™t support Home Assistant. We definitely think itā€™s worth reaching out to the Home Assistant community to see if there are any ideas there. We would expect that people would be having similar issues with ā€˜nativeā€™ HomeKit cameras since there really isnā€™t any difference between those, and the feeds from Starling Home Hub, in terms of the video stream format or data.

As an aside, we really do wish there was a ā€˜nativeā€™ Home Assistant add-on for Starling Home Hub that used the hubā€™s Developer Connect API, rather than going via HomeKit. Itā€™s just one less ā€˜translationā€™ going on and there would be much more flexibility to make sure everything works perfectly, including cameras. We donā€™t have the resource to lead the development of such a thing ourselves, however, we would be more than happy to contribute engineering/test resource (free of charge) to assist with anyone in the community who wanted to develop such an add-on. If you hear anything, let us know.

Iā€™ve taken a look at their SDC API and it seems pretty straightforward and stable (if Iā€™m reading correctly, it was basically implemented to be similar to the deprecated ā€œWorks with Nestā€ API to make it easier for developers to adapt their integrations). Given that theyā€™re at least open to collaborating (even if not explicitly leading the development), it sounds like it would be a worthwhile effort.

Unfortunately developing an integration from scratch is a bit beyond my UX-designer-and-occasionally-begrudgingly-front-end-dev skillset, but I would be more than happy to assist in testing and trying things out if someone wanted to take on the development. Any who knows, maybe I could learn a thing or two and contribute. :slight_smile:

1 Like
9

Would also love to see a Starling Hub API integration (unfortunately based on my brief search, it seems this has been an ongoing request for the past two years with no movement).

Has anyone been able to at least get the nest cameras to work within HA and Homekit at the same time using the Starling Hub, Homekit Integration? Its been either or for me.

If I add Starling Hub to Homekit (cameras and nest protect work as theyā€™re suppose to) and then remove the Starling Hub from Homekit it pops up in HA (via the Homekit Integration) with cameras and nest protect entities all showing/working. Unfortunately, the Homekit integration in HA doesnā€™t show the Cameras or Nest Protect in Homekit again, only HA?

10

Hey if anyone here is still willing to test, I am experienced with the SDC & SDM API, along with WebRTC so I think I may be able to create an integration to bring nest devices into HA via the SDC API that is available in the starling home hub, I have already integrated it into Scrypted, a high performance NVR and security camera compatibility application and it works very well.

3 Likes
11

Ready to test, have one camera, doorbell, thermostat and several protect

12

Down for testing too. I have 10 Protects.

13

Iā€™m happy to test! I have 7 Google Nest Cameras.

14

Btw, I noticed that with latest beta update 2024.47T3 starling hub can expose Google/Nest cameras or doorbells as rtsp streams. Works pretty well

1000015553
1000015553863Ɨ474 58.4 KB

1 Like
15

Can you share how you set this up?

16

I didnā€™t know that preview program is currently closed:

I guess soon enough youā€™d receive an update where is would be an option to configure it

Then itā€™s just a matter of adding a generated rstp url to home assistant as generic camera

1000015583
1000015583864Ɨ1229 67.1 KB

17

Wondering if that RTSP is local. That would allow to turn Googleā€™s cameras into regular wifi cameras and record locally?

18

Itā€™s explained here

1 Like