Hi!
Question 1: Information about what motion happened:
There’s a somewhat lengthy delay (as short as tens of seconds, to as long as minutes) from when you walk in front of your camera, and when the Blink Binding reports it. So the events aren’t great for immediate actions like turning lights on. Someday I’ll explore how to reverse engineer a more immediate notification method that the Blink app uses internally.
For now, though, assuming you understand the delay, you can set up a Rule to trigger on a Thing Event. Normally I would make an Item, and write my rules about Item state changes, but this binding was originally written to trigger the THING channel. So you don’t need an Item. If you have multiple cameras, maybe a FrontDoor, and a BackDoor, you could have a rule that looks for the channel FrontDoor.motionTriggered channel to be triggered, and take your action at that point. A different rule could look for BackDoor.motionTriggered, and take a different action (“RELEASE THE HOUNDS!”).
Since these aren’t Item state changes, there’s no way to look back over the past week (for example) to see all of the events which occurred. That’s kind of a shame, and something I’d like to look into as well.
Question 2: the update of the picture/video?
Today, only the Blink App will show you the motion videos. I am potentially interested in exploring a way to provide these videos through a web page popup, but this is more of a long term desire.
I will say that newer blink cameras (gen3 and gen4) have a setting in the Blink App, “Auto-Update Thumbnail”, which, if enabled, will replace the Home Screen thumbnail for the camera whenever it detects motion. I guess so you can see, on the Home Screen, the person who last approached the camera. I don’t use that feature (I like my thumbnails to be daytime, sunny views), but this is potentially a way to see the latest motion event inside openhab (just an image, not a video). The thumbnail can be seen from a web URL which you can find in the camera Thing, under Properties → Thumbnail. The URL isn’t directly clickable but you can copy/paste it into a browser and see the image appear.
Hope that helps. If I misunderstood, let me know!
-rb
