Demo: Alexa-enabled my Dahua NVR 54xx to control display

[MakeItRain]

Background: Previously, I had a iPad mounted on the wall running Live Cam Pro to live view all my cameras 24/7. Well, after 2 years, two problem came about with this. The first problem was that Live Cam Pro was shutdown and Tiny Cam Pro was not available on iOS as a replacement. Secondly, after 2 years, the 2018 iPad began to "puff" because the battery cell was always at 100% charge for almost 2 years. Luckily, Apple replaced the iPad under warranty and then I sold the iPad thereafter. I knew whether I got an iPad or Android tablet again, the problem would come back sooner or later.

I decided to just cut the BS and just mount a monitor. No OS needed, no Wifi dependency, no built-in battery, just a straight hard line from the NVR's HDMI over Cat5. Long story short, wife was not impressed because she said she lost the ability to manipulate the camera view by touch screen. So I told her.... "what if... I could make it Alexa-enabled so that you could tell alexa which cameras you want to view?". She said "Okay, I can settle for it.".

Challenge accepted. After 1 week of tinkering... I managed to develop an interface between Dahua's NVR and Alexa's Voice Service. The results are below:

Please note that I have censored out the camera live views because I don't want the public to see my camera views. So that's why it is blurry:

 

[jayson436]

Nice work. Are you going to elaborate on how you did this and how others can get this?

 

[MakeItRain]

It's not quick to explain and describe in an hour... there's a lot of work involved... mostly on the client side. A couple of things are a bit "hacky" and it's not something I would feel comfortable in distributing.

If there is high interest in this, I will consider developing a more proper 'public' version for a tiny price. The idea is that everything that Dahua supports in their API can all be achieved via voice command.

 

[bcre3306]

It's not quick to explain and describe in an hour... there's a lot of work involved... mostly on the client side. A couple of things are a bit "hacky" and it's not something I would feel comfortable in distributing.

If there is high interest in this, I will consider developing a more proper 'public' version for a tiny price. The idea is that everything that Dahua supports in their API can all be achieved via voice command.

Why not just use the IMOU skill in Alexa and have it streamed to a fire stick. I did that and the setup took about 10 minutes.