I have been researching and reading threads for a couple of weeks I cannot interpret or find a camera that will live stream to a wall mount tablet.
I currently have 6 arlos and am content. However I need a camera for front door that with motion it automatically gives live feed to a tablet.Not like the door bell cameras or Arlo where u have to manually turn on live feed and wait 3-8 seconds for connection.
Is there a camera that any one is happy with that wakes up with motion and automatically gives live feed to a tablet and not having to manually turn on camera or do anything to tablet.
I do have action tiles on a wall mount Kindle using Kiosk but all the research to get a camera to give live feed seems to be above my skills.
I figure I could be content with a dedicated wall tablet just for front door if I could instantly see activity triggered by motion and not have to log in tablet or wait for camera connection. It’s more convenient just to walk to door and look threw peep hole at this point.
Thanks for reading.
I really did try to solve this project myself by research but now I am at the point where I don’t know if possible with my skill set.
Any advice or direction thanks.
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2
Hi Shane,
There are quite a few cameras that offer live MJPEG simple streaming compatible with ActionTiles; especially if you lean towards “older” models of Foscam and similar; but I don’t know of any that are on “battery saving mode” until motion is detected.
Is there a power constraint in that location? If not, then see my first paragraph, and yup, a lot of members discussing recommendations.
If there is a power constraint, then Blink (especially with @RBoy’s handler) is what I’d recommend off the top of my head. ActionTiles currently does not integrate with these, but it is a popular feature request, so the odds are in your favor that it will happen some day.
Exactly.
It seems it’s hard to read between the lines of the camera manufacturer descriptions, live streaming capability seems to be vague. Live streaming automatically on motion is hard to actually find.
Well in general I think most (all?) IP cameras are always streaming, in the sense that anytime a user is logged in to the camera, the stream is available to view in real time.
For example, if your camera is aimed at your front door, and you’ve setup a tablet running ActionTiles to login to the camera, you can see the front door anytime the tablet is unlocked and ActionTiles is loaded in your web browser.
Recording of that IP camera’s stream is a different function, which is not always-on, and could be triggered on and off in a number of ways. From what you’ve described, that’s not something you’re looking for.
So in my opinion, choosing the right camera isn’t the potentially tricky part; essentially any IP camera that can be set to stream in MJPEG will do. But how will you receive an alert that the camera has detected motion, and how will you set the tablet to unlock and turn on its screen when that alert is received? Also, how will the tablet be powered?
Thanks for your help I need it.
This is what I have so far. With all the input from everyone I think a foscam and Rboys app. If I am understanding correctly the app has some options. Not sure how to get a port number for the IP setup?
Yes, a foscam with rboy’s foscam device handler/smartapp would probably help since that would allow the camera’s own motion detection function to be exposed as a motion sensor in your ST setup.
It looks like you have the tablet on the wall with an ActionTiles panel on it already. Nice job with the recessed outlet btw, that makes the tablet much easier to use mounted to the wall since you don’t have to worry about battery life.
I’m not 100% sure how to accomplish this but I think what you’d want to have happen is when the camera detects motion, that would cause your tablet to unlock and change the ActionTiles panel to a new panel with the camera stream as a tile.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
10
The idea of having ActionTiles itself respond to Events, triggers or notifications by changing to another Panel or some other major change in appearance or present a notification is on our list as an existing Feature request (with a few variations).
Switching to a full screen Media view is a great idea, and would be considered as an option related to such feature(s).
Looks like next step is getting the foscam and I can add it to my action tiles panel. With Rboy apps I can incorporate it into ST.
Either way it will be nice to not have to wait for camera to load like my current setup.
Thanks guys for clearing my fog and giving me a plan.
Yeah based on what Terry said, with a foscam camera that streams mjpeg, rboy’s foscam device handler/smartapp and ActionTiles you can receive a notification that there’s motion at your front door and then go to your tablet to see your camera feed with probably no more than one tap on the screen.
If you add one tile to the panel that’s already on your tablet that links to a new panel with a media tile set to the mjpeg URL of the camera, you’ve got a pretty quick method to see the camera feed. Include a tile in the camera feed panel that links back to your main panel, and you can get back to the main panel just as easily.
I have four arlo cameras and want to do the same thing… Show live camera view on a wall mounted tablet upon motion. Any update to get this to work with arlo and action tiles?
AFAIK, Actiontiles support for IP cameras has not expanded beyond MJPEG streams.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
15
The limitation isn’t exactly ActionTiles… The problem is that browsers (especially mobile ones) only stream limited formats and cameras only offer other limited formats, with MJPEG being the only overlap. Why don’t cameras and browsers cooperate?
The current solution is to use a transcoding server like Blue Iris, VLC, and several other options customers are experimenting with.
BTW: As far as I know, Arlo doesn’t offer any open streams in any format… Right?
