About to Purchase Smartthings, Echo, and Blink cameras

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Hello everyone! I’m a new member to the community but have been reading the site for a little while.

I’m about to purchase the above to get me foot in the door to home automation and security. I’m was thinking of using the Blink Cameras for the security part because of the cost, and motion sensor and camera integration, and no need for power cord.
Y’all have more experience with Smartthings, am I setting myself up for frustration trying to integrate the Blink cameras for security?

Any thoughts, opinions, and recommendations are welcome!

Thanks!

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Short answer, yes, you will be frustrated, but not because of the blink cameras. Because anybody trying to use SmartThings for security is going to be frustrated to some degree.

When smart things works well, it is absolutely my favorite home automation system. But it has ongoing issues with reliability, so that something that has worked well for months will suddenly stop working even though you didn’t change anything at your house. This happens every few weeks. It’s not that every customer is affected every time, but rather that many customers are affected several times a year. And that just doesn’t meet most customers expectations of a security system.

Here’s a current thread, but there are many others:

As far as the blink cameras, if you’re willing to pay an extra $10, there’s a nice custom app that you can add that has many features. It’s quite popular. But it’s still not going to work quite the way you expect. ( The “official” in the following description means that blink has blessed this integration, it’s not actually official from the SmartThings side.)

I’m tired now, so I will leave it to others to discuss.

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Sounds like you’re having a rough day. If JD is getting tired we should all be worried, he’s like the official Wiki for the forum. :slight_smile:

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Nah, this is the official wiki for the forum, :wink:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=ThingsThatAreSmart_Wiki

I’m just the Cheshire cat in this Wonderland. :smile_cat:

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You should note the most “frustrating” thing you’ll probably find with the Blink is that it doesn’t integrate with SHM video monitoring (i.e. ST platform taking videos), that’s a limitation of the ST platform, they don’t allow third party cameras to take videos (yet). If you’re looking for a ST integrated video solution then I would recommend one of the stock ST native cameras. Folks using Blink dont’ rely on ST for video rather use ST to get into the camera feeds/pics and also use the notifications from the camera to carry out actions. Check out the link posted by JD for more details on how folks are using the camera.

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Thanks for the replies! JD is on it!! Thank you sir

My thought was to use the Blink cameras and their own software to monitor the house. But integrate them so if they pick up motion, ST will turn on lights exterior and interior (something like that). But if I wanted to see what was going on then I use the blink app. I’m a total newb, haven’t even purchased yet, so if I’m over simplifying or whatever please let me know.

Reliability. Yes that’s a bit concerning. I wonder if there is also reliability problems with the Blink app and cameras by themselves?

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IMHO Blink as been pretty solid, in the last 8 months they’ve had one outage/issue which required a reboot of the sync module.

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