In the back of our house I have a Ring battery powered camera that looks down our driveway (yes, our driveway is in the back). It’s a fairly long driveway and while the video part of the camera can see quite nicely all the way down, the motion sensor does not. As such, if someone were to be walking up our driveway, the camera would not start recording video until they are basically at the house. I have been trying to figure out a way to get the camera to start recording for a specific amount of time based on other triggers. Further down the driveway, I have a Hue outdoor motion sensor that triggers several outdoor lights to turn on. So I have been focusing on trying to find a way to use that Hue motion sensor as a trigger for the Ring camera to start recording. We have SmartThings, Hue, lots of Google Home speakers/displays, and a new Echo Show 5 that came with the camera. I’m not seeing anything in SmartThings (or Hue recipes, IFTTT, Google Home routines, or Alexa routines) that will do this.
I have one Rube Goldberg style idea that involves a weird combination of all of my systems and the Echo Show talking to the nearby Google speaker, and vice versa, to display the live feed of the camera on the Echo Show, which then gets recorded by Ring. But even if that were to work, by the time all of that happens, the person is probably close enough that the Ring camera’s motion sensor is already picking them up and starting to record on its own, and that process doesn’t have a way to stop the live feed automatically, which would kill the camera’s battery.
There are tons of ways for the Ring cameras to trigger lights to do stuff, but I haven’t found a way to have the other stuff trigger the camera to record. I know if I get another Ring camera and put it out there further down the drive, I can link those in the Ring app such that motion detected by one camera triggers the other to start recording. But I already have a motion sensor down there and it seems like there should be some way to do the same thing with another motion sensor.
Am I missing something?