So, I’ve had BI and HA (along with loads of other smart home, automation and home lab type stuff running for years) Keeping just to BI and HA.
Like many others I run BI with CP.AI looking for people and cars at the front and rear of my property, however for me when BI/CP.AI triggers an alert, I have it feeding into my HA using MQTT. I perform three MQTT actions/messages.
1, A message with just the camera alert image using base64.
2, Turn a binary sensor to ‘ON’ state (this is later set to off when the alert resets, see fig2).
3, Send a message string with loads of details about the alert, camera, AI confidence etc that I can then unpick in HA as I see fit.
Fig 1 - On Alert
Fig2 – On Reset
Because I now have a bunch of stuff in HA via MQTT the sky is the limit really,
I’ve got a HA dashboard showing all my cams last alert using the bae64 image sent over.
I have it show the alert image on my Google Nest for 30 seconds when each cam triggers using a HA automation.
Furthermore, I have a node red flow that will perform an Alexa announcement “There is someone at the front door” and/or turn some lights on/off for a set period based on the time of day (see fig-3) – I limit how often this happens so if I’m outside washing the car it’s not constantly going off. The binary sensor I set ON/OFF is the trigger for this flow.
I did have (don’t use it any more) and node red flow that created a custom telegram message based on alert string information (replaced with pushover)
Really, once you have the information feeding from BI > HA it's really down to your imagination how you process it and what outputs you want. For me, I love pulling on the drive at night and the porch and hallway lights coming on, it also acts as a great security system for the rear of the house, if anyone starts poking around and our some of our house lights come on they'll think we've woken up. The Alexa announcement is so fast we often to get to our front door before the delivery driver or postman has even made it to the door, which often leave them looking confused.
Fig-3
