Using Home Assistant with USB camera

Installation
1

Hi there,
Would like to use my USB camera with Home Assistant. First I had Home Assistant as OS on my SD card but found that the add-on ‘Camera’ (via menu Hassio) didn’t support local USB cams, only IP cams.
I found an article stating that I could use a USB camera with Home Assistant using ‘motion’. I know this program, used it before so know it’ll be working. This is the article:

Use USB Camera with HomeAssistant: https://blog.kalavala.net/camera/diy/webcam/usbcam/homeassistant/motion/jpeg/binary_sensor/mqtt/raspberrypi/2018/01/11/diy-camera.html

In order to install ‘motion’, I think I had to install Home Assistant in a virtual environment according to this article:

Manual installation on a raspberry pi:

This install was successful and I can activate the virtual environment and start hass / Home Assistant from there. However, what I want to is:

  1. Have Home Assistant with ‘Hassio’ in the menu navigation so I can easily install add-ons
  2. Keep Home Assistant in a virtual environment so that I can install additional programs, like ‘motion’ where needed
  3. Autostart Home Assistant on booting the pi3
  4. Ability to use SSH to install programs that may not be available in Home Assistant

My questions are:

  1. Do you recommend this setup or do you have a better alternative? I have a hard time achieving point 1 above.
  2. What do you think of the article I found to install a USB camera, and is this the best way to go?

Thanks,
Hans

2

If you want the Supervisor menu (previously called hassio) and you want access to the OS you have to install Home Assistant Supervised on Rsapbian.

3

Thanks tom_l, that’s what I need!

4

I’ve successfully set up an old usb webcam as “security” camera via ffmpeg integration and works like a charm, but now I don’t know where it saves the temporary still images - if it ever does.

where can I find TMP folders or something like that where files like these could be stored?

I have concerns about using up storage too fast if I don’t remove the unnecessary image files in time…