Hi All,
Just testing the water to see if anybody has been able to do anything similar to this:
On motion, take a snapshot and save it somewhere
To expand, I’m just thinking of the possibility of keeping a permanent photograph stored somewhere either on site or online.
I’m thinking, if we could save a snapshot to a server (via FTP for instance), we can do a lot with it instead of just notifying of motion.
Some things that I’m thinking are:
for security - we can keep photos for longer periods of time (using a subscription like Nest Hello only allows for limited retention, and free accounts are limited to a few hours)
for identification - we could trigger a script that enables facial recognition to identify who’s at home or to notify visitors who aren’t me (currently google will notify me of ‘somebody detected at the front door’, even if it is me at the front door)
for presence - we could identify who has arrived at the office today, and who has left the building
These are just some thoughts and I’m not in any rush to implement anything, I’m just curious.
Actually you can do all of these, but not with SmartThings. Or you do have to get around it that much, that it is easier to use other approaches.
In theory you could do the following in ST, but I haven’t tested it, so it is absolutely theoretical:
Set up automation to trigger when motion detected on the Hello and send a push messages with a snapshot from the camera. (I have no clue that the automation would allow to be built, because trigger and action are from the same device, and I don’t know that the Hello is actually supported for snapshot notifications.)
Use Tasker to get the notifications and the image from it. (I haven’t used tasker but I believe it was built to this kind of use…)
Use Tasker to transfer the image to ftp etc.
And of course you need a dedicated Android phone for this. And you have to dig around what you can do with Tasker.
Other option, use Home Assistant for this task (you will need a computer which runs 24/7 or a RaspberryPi, and some knowledge how to set up, that you can receive callbacks. So you need to be a bit techie.)
The Google Nest integration works through the device access console (SDM) which cost 5 USD for the user which will have access to the Nest devices.
You can get the camera feed from the Hello without making it public, and as I can remember you get the events and you might have access to the image as well what the event already triggered. Or you can use the motion event and make an image from the feed.
The image can be stored, transfered what ever you want to do with it. It is just a script what you need for this.
There are projects for object and person recognition connected to HA. (Just search the community forum there.)
The biggest problem from the SmartThings approach is to get the image. The HA approach has a working way to make images from camera streams and to store them as well.
Here is an example how person detection works with a push message.