Thanks guys for the feedback!!
I’ll have a look at the advice and looking at the Synology option with these hikvision cameras could be an option as I do have a Synology NAS. But the reason for the cloud is in the scenario that someone enters my apartment (don’t have a driveway or garden, just a 100m2 apartment) and just decides to shut down the mains and take all electronics with them and then I do not have any evidence to show the police. That’s why I thought sending it to the cloud instantly would be a good idea, or isn’t it?
Remember that cloud storing will take A LOT of bandwidth.
For this very reason I have SD cards in my cameras instead of an NVR which can indeed be taken away: It’s quite unlikely that the thieves would go through the trouble of getting up a ladder / roof to take the cameras down and get the SDs out.
Hikvision can anyway send alerts based on events, I’ve got mines to record on motion detection and email me photos on line crossing (I get 3 pic centered around the line crossing event time).
But if you prefer you could save the line crossing event on an FTP location / NAS share that then gets synced in the cloud (e.g. Dropbox)
That might indeed be a good alternative! Have storage to the SD card, but do email/store offsite some pictures.
Remember, I’m living in an apartment with no roof, but a ceiling at 3m (9 feet) high, so not too difficult if you’d want to take the camera.
I definitely think there’s value to getting video clips stored off-site. I use a synology with foscam cameras but am well aware that the NAS could be nicked. My cameras are indoor and not difficult to reach (although all located where you’d have to cross the room to get to them). It’s a new setup but I’m thinking of using the synology actions to push stills / short clips if I’m not in home mode to my free google or microsoft storage and set up to delete regularly.
That’s exactly my thought! So if the NAS can synchronize instantly to the cloud in case of movement you’d be ok. If possible also as you say only in away mode not to have the NAS active all the time, but I realize hibernation startup might be too slow.
I don’t think there is any system that can synchronize any video stream ‘instantly’ to the cloud. Especially if it’s an HD video stream.
If you want ‘instant’ the best you can do would be still frame series.
I personally use Foscam cameras. They work really well for the money.
Thanks. Foscam can send stills based on a movement trigger?
HikVision is a greate option but keep in mind that the official prices are two times bigger than you can buy it 
Cheap and good quality cameras are Reolink, easy to buy in Europe and US (aliexpress, amazon). SD card in cameras is nice if you want to use official app for the phone. You will see alerts and can see what was happend thanks to SD recording. Unfortunately, at the night, when is raining or are some mosquitos or something like that, you will get a lot of fake alarms and SD Card will be full shortly.
Yea, ideally you want to tie in the whole setup with Deepstack or Tensorflow etc to check what the camera triggers is actual people etc.
The line crossing and movement in boxes option on the HikVision Cameras work pretty well though.
You can also remove sections where you don’t want HikVision / Synology to look for movement.
I know that the ones that I use can trigger on built-in motion detection and take snapshots but I don’t use the camera snapshot capability since you can use cgi commands from HA to take snapshots and send them based on the built-in camera motion detection trigger.
And I also use Blue Iris software as a DVR to use the BI motion detection to trigger video recordings to my PC.
Do you have some sample code or examples I could have a look at? I could use my movement sensor to trigger the snapshots from my current basic camera to test and play around.
It’s referenced on the foscam component page
Or a quick forum search
With Synology you can do commands like:
rest_command:
gate_record:
url: 'https://ipaddress:5001/webapi/entry.cgi?api=SYNO.SurveillanceStation.ExternalEvent&method="Trigger"&version=1&eventId=1&eventName="This is external event1"&account="username"&password="password"'
I have more info on my post here:
i would focus on the camera recording system as cameras change over time and you will likely have a mix … i use blue iris security software and it supports a vast area of cameras…i’m currently using cameras from foscam, ubiquiti (very good picture quality and good price), hkvision, doorbird (door camera/doorbell) … in all i have 25 cameras controlled via blue iris for motion detection, recording (NAS) and alerts (sent to HA via MQTT messages) btw, (stay away from wifi cameras, they will not scale to large systems (i’ve tried) -> use ethernet with POE). i then use my blue iris server to serve camera streams to HA and HADashboards throughout my home. In addition, i’m using tensorflow on my HA system to qualify motion detection from Blueiris with alerts for people,cars and trucks for certain cameras.
if you use video cameras with HA be aware of processing power particularly if you add object detection via tensorflow or similar … i started a year ago with HA 1) hassio on rpi3 and lasted 3 days due to limitations for OS enhancements ; 2) i went to debian on RPI3 3 months after i started with cameras and video; 3) moved to intel NUC with ubuntu 18.x; then i started using tensorflow ; 4) now using Intel Skull Canyon NUC on ubuntu 18.x with 16GB DRAM and all is well … i’m supporting 25 video cameras, 5 HADashboards, 5 cameras with tensorflow object detection along with over a 130 components.
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Here are a couple of examples of motion detection sensors triggered by the camera built-in detector for newer and older Foscam camera’s:
- platform: command_line
name: "Kitchen Camera Motion"
command: 'curl -k --silent "http://192.168.1.51:8001/get_status.cgi?user=XXXX&pwd=YYYY" | grep -oP "(?<=alarm_status=).*?(?=;)"'
value_template: >-
{%- if value == "0" -%}
None
{%- elif value == "1" -%}
Detected
{%- endif -%}
scan_interval: 3
- platform: command_line
name: "Garage Camera Motion"
command: 'curl -k --silent "http://192.168.1.52:8002/cgi-bin/CGIProxy.fcgi?cmd=getDevState&usr=XXXX&pwd=YYYYYY" | grep -oP "(?<=motionDetectAlarm>).*?(?=</motionDetectAlarm>)"'
value_template: >-
{%- if value == "0" -%}
Disabled
{%- elif value == "1" -%}
None
{%- elif value == "2" -%}
Detected
{%- endif -%}
scan_interval: 3
the automation I have set up right now for a “trespass alarm system” doesn’t use the motion sensors above but instead uses door and window sensors that trigger the “alarm system” warning siren and the snapshot service and then sends the snapshots via pushbullet. You can easily adapt the code to use any binary sensor so you will need to create a binary_sensor out of the above (non-binary) camera motion sensors:
- alias: Tresspass Warning
initial_state: 'on'
trigger:
# test switch
- platform: state
entity_id: input_boolean.bool_7
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_1_sensor
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_2_sensor
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_3_sensor
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_4_sensor
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.comp_rm_motion_template
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: sensor.sunroom_east_pe_beam
to: 'OFF'
condition:
condition: and
conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_boolean.bool_6
state: 'on'
action:
- delay: '00:00:05'
- service: camera.snapshot
data_template:
entity_id: >
{% set mapper = {
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_1_sensor':'camera.kitchen',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_2_sensor':'camera.dummy',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_3_sensor':'camera.dining_room',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_4_sensor':'camera.new_living_room',
'binary_sensor.comp_rm_motion_template':'camera.living_room',
'input_boolean.bool_7':'camera.dummy',
'sensor.sunroom_east_pe_beam':'camera.diningroom' } %}
{{ mapper[trigger.entity_id] }}
filename: >
{% set mapper = {
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_1_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/kitchen_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_2_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/dummy_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_3_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/diningroom_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_4_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/new_livingroom_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.comp_rm_motion_template':'/config/www/snapshots/livingroom_alarm_1.jpg',
'input_boolean.bool_7':'/config/www/snapshots/dummy_alarm_1.jpg',
'sensor.sunroom_east_pe_beam':'/config/www/snapshots/diningroom_pe_alarm_1.jpg' } %}
{{ mapper[trigger.entity_id] }}
- service: script.burglar_alarm
data_template:
triggered_by: "{{ trigger.to_state.attributes.friendly_name }}"
- delay: '00:00:05'
- service: notify.pushbullet_notify #notify.gmail_notify_alarm
data_template:
#title: Alarm System
message: 'Warning - Trespass alarm has been triggered!'
data:
file: >
{% set mapper = {
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_1_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/kitchen_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_2_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/dummy_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_3_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/diningroom_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.door_window_sensor_4_sensor':'/config/www/snapshots/new_livingroom_alarm_1.jpg',
'binary_sensor.comp_rm_motion_template':'/config/www/snapshots/livingroom_alarm_1.jpg',
'sensor.sunroom_east_pe_beam':'/config/www/snapshots/diningroom_pe_alarm_1.jpg' } %}
{{ mapper[trigger.entity_id] }}
just to be aware that the “mapper” requires a line entry for every possible situation (trigger in this case) so that’s why I needed to create the “camera.dummy” entry since I don’t have a camera that corresponds to that motion sensor but I still wanted it to trigger the alarm.
Found this old thread, maybe you can help me out. If I upload from my cameras to my Home Assistant when motion is detected (FTP plugin running), can I then upload the clip to Dropbox or similar? Do you know?
I’m not sure what you mean. If you upload your videos to FTP already, why do you need them added to Dropbox?
Answer however would be yes, you can put the video anywhere you want. Not sure if HA can do this for you however, depending on how it’s installed, you’ll probably need a script to do this work…
Sorry, was thinking that if I can upload the movies to Dropbox I will be able to view them easily on the go instead of loggin on to my FTP. Getting the videos to the FTP is simple but viewing them in a nice way is harder.
You can probably do it by modifying this script:
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You are overestimating my programming skills But I will have a look - thanks a lot!