Unifi Doorbell -> BlueIris

Getting a UniFi Doorbell into Blue Iris (the hard way, because the easy way broke)

I use Blue Iris as my primary CCTV platform, but like many home lab tinkerers, I also have some UniFi kit in the mix. In this case, a UniFi doorbell camera managed by UniFi Protect on a UDM-Pro.

On paper, this should be easy. UniFi cameras can expose RTSP streams. Blue Iris can ingest RTSP streams. Job done.

Except, as usual, it wasn't quite that simple.

Updates to announcing Reolink doorbells on Alexa

A while back, I wrote a post on how I build a Node-Red flow to allow me ask specific echo devices to announce visitors pressing my ReoLink doorbell. This worked great, but there were a couple of shortcomings; 

 

• The list of registered devices would last only as long as Node-Red was active. If I needed to restart the Node-Red docker for any reason, I would also need to re-register announcement devices. 
  
  
• The ONVIF node the flow relies on is a little flaky, and will occasionally just disappear from Node Red. 

I've added functionality to store the list of devices in a text file, so it persists between Node-Red restarts. I also added some notes on how to recover from the self-destructing ONVIF nodes, bring this all up to v1.1.1.

The device list saving is managed automatically as part of the voice registration process, but there's also a manual trigger that can be used in testing. If you use this, you might need to adjust the save and read file locations, particularly if you're not running Node-Red in a docker, like me.

The full flow is pasted below;

Set up Reolink Doorbell video with BlueIris

I recently purchased a Reolink Video Doorbell PoE on Amazon prime day to replace the Comfort intercom thats going on 20 years old. I selected this item over others as it supposedly integrates with BlueIris which I use for all my other surveillance cameras.

There's no distinct guide for setting this up that I could find, so here's what I did, for posterity.

Video Surveillance on unRaid

Inspired by everyones favourite unRaid you tuber SpaceInvaderOne's then partially completed series on setting up CCTV in unRaid, I figured it was time to get started on a little bit of home security.

I'd previously worked on building an interface to my legacy Comfort alarm / home control system, and that's fine for basic alarm, but video was always the next step.

SpeaceInvaderOne conducted a basic analysis of cameras and software available, before publishing a walkthrough of how to set up his chosen Shinobi docker. This, along with some other research, started me on my journey. I went ahead and purchased two of the SV3C 1080p PoE cameras he mentioned. These would connected to the spare PoE ports on my Unifi Switch 8 (see my Unify blog post for more details).

I tried installing Shinobi, (before the walkthrough dropped), and failed miserably. In any case, I'd previously researched the area and at the time decided that Blue Iris looked like the best option for scalability and integration.