Hi Community, I’m a new member and first of all wanted to thank everybody to make this openHab possible and grow, this is amazing platform let dreams come true.
My question is that I can’t find addon for Yi Technology devices (please correct me if i’m wrong) https://www.yitechnology.com/yi-1080p-home-camera
and I would like to buy and use with openHab the Yi home camera device just don’t know where to start and how to gain the necessary information in order to make it work with openhab. If there is already something under different name please tell me if not I’m ok to get my hands dirty and find out (contribute and share my findings).
As a new user I’m still familiarizing myself with the platform but would love to find some best practices how you guys “debug” or find out the necessary information from new devices.
Still interested on this topic? I have recently bought a couple of Yi Home 1080p cameras and I have been able to integrate them with Openhab2 and Habpanel.
If anyone is still interested I can explain how I did with them.
First, no specific binding needed in my case. You just need to flash the correct firmware in the camera. The tricky part is that there seems to be a combination of internal hardware and serial number to get to the correct version you need to flash.
You will have to read very carefully what is the right version you will need. No need to say that you will use it at your own risk and that there is always the risk of bricking your camera.
The instructions mention you must use a maximum of 16 Gb microSD card. I can tell you that I have used a 32 Gb one (the maximum size allowed for the camera) and it worked perfectly.
Once I had the new AllWinner firmware installed and after a couple of reboots, the camera shows two interfaces: the original one fully operational with the Xiaomi app; a new interface accessible via browser. There I disconnected the Cloud services (not really needed, just for security reasons), activated RTSP (only low quality to save memory), and configured the MQTT client.
There is an issue with the MQTT client and the camera events sent to the broker. You wil only receive the motion_stop message if you have activated the AI human motion detection, most probably because the original firmware “consumes” the motion_start message and the hack is not working. The problem with this is that as you only receive motion_stop, your item does not change value and, in principle, you would not know if you had motion. I found a simple workaround: a rule that changes the state of the item to “reset”. This way, when a “motion_stop” is received, I know there was a lost motion_start. Sound silly, buth works very well.
On the video side, I am using only pictures in Habpanel, so a simple image frame with refresh every 60 seconds is working well. If I see something I don’t like, I can access the RTSP video stream with VLC or any other IPCam app. The web interface of the hack is more sophisticated and there are json messages that you can process. I have not worked this out because the web interface of the hack gives you a very simple way to see captured recordings.
