Hi everybody,
I’m writing to you to ask you for an advice since I think here there are a lot of home automation and openHAB enthusiasts
I have one IP cameras in my LAN for surveillance reason; this camera is connected to a NVR and it is placed near the front gate of the house.
I have a DoorBird as a doorbell and I have activated the openHAB official biding to catch the “button pressed” event when someone rings the bell.
At the output of the NVR, I’m going to put an HDMI extender ethernet (TX) and then put in one other room of the house an HDMI extender (RX) and connect the HDMI cable to a small video surveillance monitor.
As soon as the doorbell button is pressed, my idea is that openHAB has to:
turn on the small video surveillance monitor (and it suddenly receive the video signal because it is always on from NVR source)
after 2-3 minutes, turn off the video surveillance monitor
How can I turn on/off my HDMI small monitor from openHAB?
Do you have some advices or ideas to avoid having the small monitor always on all day long?
Based on the device.
The easiest and always working solution is what @Bruce_Osborne suggested. Cut the power from the screen.
If you can access the “inside” part of it, you can just maybe cut the video feed (but this is not that simple).
For any other device (like Raspberry Pi), you can easily turn off the HDMI output for example, which turns off the monitor also after a few seconds (if there is no signal), but this is another story…
Turning the screen on with a smart plug would depend on the monitor’s ability to turn on when power is restored. Most LCD monitors I’ve come across don’t do that, but you can probably find one that does.
There may also be a delay while the monitor powers up, so you’d have to account for that as well.
As an alternative, the HabPanelViewer app can wake up the screen on an Android tablet. If you could run your video through openHAB (which might be more work than you want), you could place the tablet wherever it can be plugged into a wall with no need for HDMI.
Edit: Or get something like this to press your monitor’s power button.
I don’t think it’s beyond this forum. We talk about HDMI-CEC with respect to automation for home entertainment, and it’s entertaining to watch wide-angle videos of people standing awkwardly at your door. Or is that not the main reason people are installing doorbell cameras?
On that note, if an LCD monitor has an IR remote, an easy/inexpensive solution would be to get a Broadlink RM Mini 3 to control the monitor. You’d still need the predictive doorbell that @rossko57’s working on, though.
Seriously though, I agree that we need to know more about the OP’s options/capabilities, particularly with respect to the LCD monitor.
Sure, but HDMI-CEC is a standard that’s accessible from within openHAB, particularly through receiver and TV bindings. Which, come to think of it, are also a possibility for the OP. In this case, I think it fits within the realm of openHAB-related topics.
I believe there is an HDMI-CEC binding available from someone that will accomplish what you want…controlling power over the HDMI cable. You may need third party hardware to accomplish this…(search for this)
Also these discussions are what stimulate ideas and new bindings here in the forum…I don’t think it’s the place of any member to dictate what can an can not be discussed.
I just realized after reading your comment that I wrote “HDMI-ARC” instead of “HDMI-CEC”, so I’ve edited my posts accordingly. I can conclusively say that Audio Return Channel has no bearing on this topic.
A Chromecast can do that and the ipCamera binding can send just about any camera to the Chromecast using the Chromecast binding. Some monitors will have HDMI-CEC disabled by default, may call it something different or may be lacking the support.
I use a Home Hub since it is always powered on and does not disrupt our TV viewing when the baby crys on the babymonitor or the camera detects a person trying to look in a window.
It is not hard to run video through openhab, but perhaps I am biased
There are people that have cameras that jump to the foreground automatically when motion or other triggers occur. Your suggestion is a good one if a tablet is available to wall mount and there are threads of people doing this with magnetic mounting and inductive charging systems.
That may have been humour, but I actually have that setup and working well at my house. My camera knows when someone is walking towards the door (or any window) and will ring the bell before they reach the door and a animated GIF is sent to me so I know who has visited my home in real time when at work. I have family that visit and don’t ring the bell, so this catches them.
The key to doing this is a Hikvision camera that has a LINE CROSSING alarm that will notify openhab when movement crosses a line IN ONE DIRECTION ONLY. People walking away from the door do not trip the rules, only walking towards a door will trigger the rules.
Agree totally, there can be strong resistance by thankfully a minority in this forum to creating new bindings as some see them as a burden that needs updating when other ways exist which are not user friendly, consistent nor fully featured.
When people suggest a new feature they usually get mud thrown and told to create a PR of their own, instead we should thank them for the idea and suggest this link.
Yes the ipCamera binding can do this for any camera. It can even capture frames from before the triggering event. Example…
Someone pushes the doorbell, this triggers the GIF creation.
The GIF is created for you and shows the person walking in the gate, walking up the path and pushing the button! The preroll and postroll settings control what the GIF will show and you can also set the playback animation speed.
Openhab can push that moving gif to your mobile phone so I know who has visited in real time so I don’t need to sit in front of a NVR reviewing footage every night.
The binding allows the GIF to be cast to any home hub or Chromecast.
There is a lot of cool stuff the binding can do that most people do not even know about.
