Blue Iris controlling home automation

[Spooling]

OK thanks, I'll see if I can figure it out. Another thing I noticed is that the mcsMQTT broker seems to go unresponsive after awhile. I have to muck around in the general settings again to get it to be able to successfully run a test again. Have you seen this behaviour?

 

[prsmith777]

Never had the broker go unresponsive. Its been rock solid for me getting hundreds of topics per hour

 

[Spooling]

Well, I'm not sure if it goes offline or not I guess. But if I try to run the test in the MSQTT setup menu after a few minutes it fails with the error 16001

I'm pretty much at the point of giving up on this. I have no idea what to try next. It just doesn't seem to work.

 

[Spooling]

Well I got it working finally. The fix seemed to be changing the name of the MQTT Client ID from BlueIris back to mcsMQTT. Seems odd to me, but maybe there's a good reason. It's been running rock solid ever since.

 

[Flintstone61]

Holy shit. I'm such a caveman. C'mon man...I finally used Apple wallet 2x this weekend, (both times forgot wallet) .....Now all this....you guys are something else....

 

[restorick2378]

That's really the crux of it. The home automation software handles the management of the Z-Wave devices and provides a mechanism
for automating control of those devices when events occur. MQTT allows other software, such as Blue Iris, a straightforward way to
send those events to the home automation software.

There are several good home automation packages, and the choice on which one to implement often comes down to the degree of
complexity and configuration the user wants. I use Home Assistant, Blue Iris, and MQTT and it all works well. I am
happy to provide details on my hardware and software, but I don't want to bore anybody (further), so, I will include a couple of screenshots,
that might make the process a little more tangible.

Blue Iris as an MQTT client pushes a message to the MQTT broker with a topic and payload - in this case, my
"driveway_right" camera. Note that the text for the MQTT topic and payload is just something I made up, but it has to
be formatted with slashes as shown (that's not entirely accurate - you could just subscribe to something like "blue_iris" to receive
all events, but you would have no idea which camera or device sent the message.)

Camera Settings--> Trigger--> Immediate actions...--> Web request or MQTT:
View attachment 153901

And similar to the Homeseer 3 screenshot above, Home Assistant provides something called an "Automation" which has Triggers, Conditions, and Actions.
A "Trigger" can be an MQTT message:
View attachment 153902

and then an "Action" (turn on a Z-Wave switch in this case):
View attachment 153898

It can get complicated pretty quickly if you want, with various conditions, multiple areas, devices, and entities, but hopefully this helps.

Perhaps a new thread for HA and BI users? I'm just learning both, but have great hopes to integrate BI into my home automation workflows.

 

[Mike A.]

There's a subforum here if you haven't seen it:

Home Automation

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