Building automations

Automations connect what happens at your cameras to actions: drag nodes onto a canvas and wire 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.

A new flow (+ on the Automations page) starts empty and disabled.

Triggers

A flow can have more than one trigger.

• 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, a plugin starting or stopping, or a plugin sending a notification. The last one turns every plugin push into a trigger, a text alert of the NVR plugin for example: the title and the notification's data fields are available as {{system.title}}, {{system.type}}, {{system.alertTitle}} and so on, so an If/Else condition can pick the one you mean.
• 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. Started with the Run button, for testing.

Virtual sensors are set with a Control sensor action and trigger through Sensor change.

Conditions

• 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

• 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 leaves the others notifying. 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.
• 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.
• Ask the assistant. Hand the situation to the assistant and use its answer: pick the user it answers for, write the question with the flow's variables, optionally pass a picture, and deliver it as push, as a conversation, or only as a variable for the next steps.
• 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 on through variables. A node that produces something offers Add output variable in its settings: name it, and every step wired after it can use the value. Variables on a step lists what is available; if it is empty, the source node isn't connected yet.

Write a variable as {{name}} in any text field. 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.

Set variable stores a value for steps further down. Alias on a node prefixes 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

The toolbar holds the name, Enabled, and 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.

camera.ui disables an automation automatically if it points at a camera or sensor you've removed, with a notice to fix it. The list shows each automation's last run and lets you enable, disable or delete several at once.

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. ↩︎