How to activate a virtual motion sensor with a virtual switch?

I saw there was a smartapp for this somewhere, and I got it and tried it out but it didn’t work. I wanted to ask if anyone has and is currently successfully doing this? This is what I’m doing and my setup:

I have two IP cameras. It’s way too much resources to run sighthound on my pc and try to use it every day, so, I have a virtual private server I can use for projects like this. Unfortunately, my DCS 930L cameras can only notify with two methods: email and ftp. Well, all the automation options of email are just too slow so they’re out of the picture. So I went with FTP.

I setup an FTP server and then used inotify-tool (inotifywait) to watch for new files in the folder. If a new file is found, it initiates a curl post reqest to IFTTT’s maker channel. Unfortunately, there isn’t an option in IFTTT to set a motion sensor to active…and apparently this isn’t as easy as I thought.

The idea is to have an ifttt recipe set a virtual motion sensor to ‘active’. Or at least IFTTT to toggle a simulated switch to on, and that switch to set a motion sensor as active.

Does anyone have a working solution for this?

This should be a good start:

4 Likes

Seriously JDRoberts, of all the users on here, I think you’ve helped me out the most. I’m going to give this one a shot. It looks much more promising than the one I used before.

3 Likes

hmmmm…the app isn’t available on the github repository according to smartthings, but I can access the code itself on github, but when I try to add it manually it throws an error.

EDIT: I didn’t read the instructions clear enough. Now I got it :slight_smile:

1 Like

True for a large percentage of people here!

5 Likes