Tag: skybell

(Amazon links are affiliate links, where I get a small commission of purchased item)

I have a SkyBell HD doorbell, and it sends notifications to my wife and I with the SkyBell app when it detects motion or the doorbell button is pressed. It works well enough, but it’s another separate app sending separate notifications. The entire point of automation is to make life easier, so let’s see about getting those notification in Telegram, with the rest of our smart home notifications. Here’s how the native app looks:

Here’s how the notification looks within Telegram:

There’s a few different parts to this flow. We’re going to send a notification for both motion, and button press. Once motion or button press is detected, a call service node takes a snapshot of the camera, stores it locally on your Home Assistant hub, waits one second to allow it to save properly, and then another call service node sends it as a notification.

Let’s do eet.

First part is easy, it’s two state nodes monitoring the Skybell, one for the button press, one for the motion.

Here’s how the configurations looks for the doorbell motion:

Here’s how the doorbell button looks:

Next is the call service node taking a snapshot:

Here’s how it looks on the inside:

A few things we need to go over with this. The “snapshot” service does what it’s called, it takes a snapshot of the camera you specify in entity ID. In this case, “camera.front_door_last_activity” is the camera we’ll be taking a snapshot from. In the Data field, you’ll notice “filename” and the location of where the snapshot will be stored. So a snapshot is taken of the camera, and stored where you specify in the data field. We then use a delay node set to 1 second to give the snapshot time to copy to the file location. We then use a call service node to send the snapshot from the save location to whatever notify service you are using. I’m using Telegram, so I send it with the send_photo service. Below is the configuration.

With this flow configuration, you will receive a photo of your doorbell when motion is detected, or the button is pressed. Here’s the code.