Building automations

Automations connect what happens at your cameras to actions camera.ui can take. You build them visually: drag nodes onto a canvas and connect them into a flow. Automations are an admin feature.

How a flow works

A flow runs from left to right: a trigger starts it, optional conditions decide whether it continues, and actions do something. Utilities help pass data between steps.

Open Automations from the menu, then create one with the + button. A new flow starts empty and disabled, so you can build it before it runs.

Triggers

A trigger is what starts a flow. You can use more than one.

• Detection event. Something detected at a camera: motion, a person, vehicle, or animal, an audio event like a doorbell or glass breaking, a recognized face, or a license plate. Filter by object, confidence, and event phase (start, update, end).
• Sensor change. A sensor's state changes, like a contact sensor opening. This also covers your cameras' detection sensors: motion, objects, faces, license plates, and classifiers. Face, plate, and classifier sensors carry what was recognized, so a flow can react to a specific person, car, plate, or result, for example a bird classifier that reports the species.^[1]
• Schedule. A recurring time, set with a cron expression.
• System event. Something in camera.ui itself, such as a camera connecting or disconnecting, or a plugin starting or stopping.
• Webhook. An external service calls a URL to start the flow.
• MQTT message. A message arrives on an MQTT topic. Set the topic (+ and # wildcards work) and choose how to match: any message, an exact payload, or a value at a JSON path like params.switch:0.output. Needs the MQTT connection set up in Settings.
• Geofence. A user enters or leaves a location you define.
• Manual. You run the flow yourself with the Run button, useful while building and testing.

Virtual sensors work here too. You create them on the Sensors page, then set them with a Control sensor action and react to them with a Sensor change trigger.

Conditions

Conditions decide whether a flow continues:

• If / else. Branch on a comparison.
• Switch. Branch on several possible values.
• Sensor state. Check one or more sensors, combined with AND or OR. Each value can be a fixed value or a variable from an earlier step. For a detection sensor you can check a specific value, like a recognized name, a plate, or a classifier label. When a sensor holds several values at once, the check passes if any one matches, and matching ignores upper and lower case.
• Time. Only continue within a time-of-day range and on chosen days.

Actions

Actions are what the flow does:

• Send notification. Push an alert with a title, message, and severity.
• Notifications on/off. Mute or unmute push. Under Applies to pick Everyone, One camera, or One user. Muting one camera stops its push while every other camera keeps notifying, so you can silence the street camera during the day and turn it back on at night. Muted alerts still land in the in-app bell and the events still show up on the timeline. Critical alerts always come through.
• Capture snapshot. Take a fresh image from a camera.
• Control sensor. Set an accessory, such as turning on a light or locking a door. Values can be fixed or taken from a variable.
• Camera control. Change one or more of a camera's settings in one step: snooze detections, disable the camera, recording (on/off, mode, pre-buffer, and which streams it records), detection thresholds and timeouts, PTZ autotrack (on/off, which object types it tracks, return to home, minimum confidence), and snapshot refresh. So "record just the main stream while the disk is full" is an automation.
• HTTP request. Call an external service.
• MQTT publish. Send a message to an MQTT topic. Set the topic and the payload, and turn on Retain if the broker should keep the message for anyone subscribing later. Wildcards aren't allowed in the topic. Needs the MQTT connection set up in Settings.
• Plugin call. Run a detection or analysis plugin on an image.
• Set variable and delay. Hold a value, or wait before the next step.

Utilities

• Image input. Load an image (from a URL, a variable, or an upload) for an action to use.
• Output. Collect results to view after the flow runs.

Passing values between steps

Steps hand values to each other through variables. A node that produces something offers Add output variable in its settings: give it a name, and every step wired after it can use that value. Variables on a step lists what is available to it, so if a field says nothing is there, the node it should come from is not connected yet.

Write a variable as wherever a field takes text, for example a notification body that greets the person the camera recognized. Fields that only take one value, like a sensor value or a condition, let you pick the variable from a list instead of typing it.

Two things help when a flow grows. Set variable stores a value for later, useful when you need it several steps down. And Alias on a node puts a prefix in front of its output variables, so result from two different plugins becomes cam1.result and cam2.result instead of clashing.

A misspelled name is caught on save, with Unknown variable naming the one it could not resolve.

Options and running

In the toolbar you can name the flow, turn it Enabled on or off, and set two behaviors:

• Ignore repeated events, so a burst of triggers runs the flow once.
• Wait for completion, so a new trigger waits until the current run finishes.

Save with the Save button. If your flow has a Manual trigger, a Run button lets you test it. In the list, each automation shows when it last ran, and camera.ui disables one automatically if it points at a camera or sensor you've removed, with a notice to fix it. On the list you can select several automations at once to enable, disable, or delete them together.

To share automations, see Blueprints & store.

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1. A Detection event fires on each raw event as it happens. A Sensor change reacts to the sensor's own state, which keeps the recognized names, plates, or labels for as long as the subject stays in view. ↩︎