Unifi Protect w Google Assistant & Google Hub Third party integrations
Table of Content
It is disappointing there is no affordable 4k camera option when consumer products do offer them. Based on my current experience with the product here are some things I think would be nice to have from Ubiquiti. I am installing this system into a home, and that’s not squarely where Ubiquiti is aiming this product at.
The doorbell ring now plays chime sounds on all my HomePods. One of the top wishlist on UniFi protect line for me is its integration with major smart home platform . In fact, today I will show steps to integrate UniFi Protect products into Homekit.
Using Home Assistant to integrate a Unifi Protect G4 Doorbell and Amazon Alexa to announce visitors
However, I lose any Alexa integration and this nice little "someone is at the door" announcement. So this seems like a perfect job for Home Assistant. In this guide, we have actually set up Homebridge Hub. This is an universal Hub for many non-Homekit compatible platforms/devices.
UniFi Protect has no monthly fees, no matter how many cameras you have attached to your system. You should see Homebridge’s bridge instant added here. If you created isolated bridge for UniFi Protect of its own on Homebridge, you must make sure that “bridge” is added. Ensure appropriate bridge instance of Homebridge is registered to the Homekit.
MIGRATING FROM CLOUDKEY+ V1.x
Use to dynamically set the message on a Doorbell LCD screen. This service should only be used to set dynamic messages (i.e. setting the current outdoor temperature on your Doorbell). Static messages should still be set using the Select entity and can be added/removed using the add_doorbell_text/remove_doorbell_text services. This will be the message that is automatically selected when a message “expires”. Button - A disabled by default button is added for each door lock device. The button will let you reboot your door lock device.
Similar to its competitions, this is a home automation software/platform designed to be a central control system for wide range of smart home appliances with emphasis on local control . As of today, HA is considered to be one of the most popular local home automation platform. If anyone is serious about a home automation using local control, this is one platform you cannot ignore. This Integration is part of the default HACS store. Search for unifi protect under Integrations and install from there. After the installation of the files you must restart Home Assistant, or else you will not be able to add UniFi Protect from the Integration Page.
Dynamic Doorbell Messages
Such feature alone can put UniFi Protect product line into whole new dimension for general consumers in competition with Netgear Arlo, Eufy and Netamo while providing benefit of local storage. After it is turned enabled, click Doorbell.Trigger switch icon on the Homebrige. This should trigger Homekit notification on iOS device and if all working HomePod chime ring. UniFi Protect doorbell notification should be popping up so long as you have notification on UniFi Protect turn on.
Now, go to Configuration, Automation, and Add a new Automation. Note that your Entity names may be different if you give your front doorbell camera a different name. I am not a Home Assistant expert, but it's clearly a massive and powerful ecosystem.
What’s home automation?
I believe setting up Home Assistant on a Pi is the best and easiest way to get started. That said, you can also run in a Docker Container, on a Synology or other NAS, or just on Windows or Mac in the background. Optionally, you can pay Nabu Casa $5 for remote network access via transparent forwarding.
This includes the G4 Doorbell, G4 Bullet, G4 Pro and G4 Instant. Select the camera you want to ensure can stream in UniFi Protect. You can replace 2.0.0~beta.5 with whatever version of UniFi Protect you want to downgrade to. Any dashes in the version (-), replace with tilde (~). In the event you accidentally upgrade to an Early Access version of UniFi Protect you can downgrade to a stable version by either restoring a backup or by manually downgrading your UniFi Protect.
If this is not working, then the issue may be on the UniFi Protect/Doorbell setting themselves. Now you can go to Homebridge Accessories and confirm it has added an new entry Doorbell Trigger as a switch entry. In fact, you can actually click the Doorbell Trigger switch icon on Homebridge Accessory menu and this should trigger Homekit event e.g. In this step, we will be creating UniFi Local Access account so Homebridge can use that account to access UniFi Protect controller.
To address this I needed to either set it up with a physically isolated WiFi of its own or configure a VLAN which I could not do with the Google WiFi. The Google Wifi actually performed great overall but we do have an above average number of devices in our house and sometimes we would experience what I believed to be congestion. This is likely because Google Wifi only supports SU-MIMO, the UniFi solution, on the other hand, supports MU‑MIMO. MU-MIMO allows a Wi-Fi router to communicate with multiple devices simultaneously. This decreases the time each device has to wait for a signal and dramatically speeds up the network as a result.
I recently made the switch from Google WIFI and NEST Cameras to Ubiquiti Unfi and Protect. A few things motivated these changes and I wanted to talk about them in this blog post. Unlike with many other things, playing audio to your speakers requires your Home Assistant to be able to reach your camera directly. You can enable debug logging and it will output the full FFmpeg command that will be run and the output from FFmpeg to help you troubleshoot why audio is not playing to the device. These URLs work great when trying to send notifications.
Unleash the full power of UniFi Protect to manage your cameras, users, alerts, and other system settings from directly within the mobile applications. If you want to know what other options you can turn on/configure on the UniFi Protect Hub, you can check the developers official GitHub website. After restarting, you can go back to the same screen as above but now you will see Homekit code. You can add the accessory on iOS using the code. Local Username and password are what you will be entering in subsequent step. I think that is because unifi does not use the “binary” entity anymore.
Now that you have UniFi controller integration account setup, you are ready to install the integration. Home Assistant needs to access UniFi Protect controller. For the security reason, you want create a dedicated user account for home automation device integration.
But the other part, platform independence is what you want here from HA. By default uses the connection host provided by your UniFi Protect instance for connecting to cameras for RTSP streams. If you would like to force the integration to use the same IP address you provided above, set this to true. Button - A button to trigger the chime manually for each smart chime device.
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