Detected motion does not include snapshot

[wondergit113]

Hi there, I've been trying all kinds of troubleshooting including removing/re-installing all of Homebridge and associated plugins, and even nuking NPM on my macOS install but still cannot get motion detection notifications to include snapshot. I recently had it work 1 time for the first time since the day the feature was released on the old homebridge-ring-alarm version of the plugin but can't figure out how to get it to work consistently.

I followed troubleshooting steps here: #41 (comment) but still no go.

Is it expected behavior that it only shows up some of the time rather than every time?

I've even tried setting up another Ring login/account. Happy to nuke everything again if that's what it takes to get this to work. Nothing fancy about my config, just username and password.

[dgreif]

@jamesg311 you shouldn’t need to try all of that again. My snapshots have been a little sporadic but work 90% of the time. There is definitely some work to be done on the code that garbs the snapshot and how long it tries for. What camera model do you have?

[wondergit113]

I have Spotlight cams. They show up as "Spotlight Cam (stickup_cam_v4)". I have two and they both behave the same way.

I've set both to have notifications enabled and the notifications come through fine most of the time but mostly never with snapshots.

[dgreif]

Ahh, I’ve been wondering if this would come up soon. Several users had issues with time stamps on doorbot_v3 and the new door cam view. The thing these have in common is they are both battery powered. I was surprised that no one had complained about snapshots on other battery cameras like the stickup cam, so I wasn’t sure if they had slow snapshots as well. To confirm the behavior, could you open the Ring app periodically and see how frequently it fetches new snapshots? Wired cameras seem to be able to fetch a new snapshot every 30 seconds, while battery powered cameras can only fetch them every 10 minutes.

I think in the end I’m going to have to keep track of which models are battery vs wired. There is a nice chart over at python-ring-doorbell/python-ring-doorbell#112 that I can use to start. The downside for users like yourself is that the majority of the time you will get a stale snapshot on notifications that is up to 10 minutes old.

[wondergit113]

Ah yes, I have a Doorbell_V4 (Ring Video Doorbell 2) as well. It's battery powered too. And yes, the snapshots appear to be every 10 minutes.

[dgreif]

Thanks for testing the timing for me. I've added a list of known camera models that use batteries, and will assume that each of them has slow (10 minute) snapshots. If you upgrade to v4.0.3 you should start seeing snapshots. They will most likely be stale, but better than nothing 😄. This 10 minute limitation is imposed by Ring, so unfortunately there isn't going to be a way around it.

[wondergit113]

Got it. updated to 4.0.3 and when motion is detected I'll report back. If there isn't a recent snapshot, will the rich notification pull a new one? or will it always pull a cached one?

[dgreif]

It will try to pull a new one, but currently it. Will only wait 5 seconds for it before going with a stale one. This is something I can definitely improve and will try to address next week

[wondergit113]

I'm seeing some motion notifications with images but not always. I've also noticed that my Ring Doorbell 2 (doorbell_v4) has a Status and Notifications setting on it's device settings page but the same isn't true of the Spotlight Cam. Do you know why that might be? Maybe that's part of the issue?

[dgreif]

@jamesg311 give v4.0.5 a try. I changed the logic for snapshots so that it is smarter about when it should return a stale snapshot vs waiting for a new one.

As for the notification settings, it is a bit confusing how it works in Home.

• Motion Sensors have notification settings for all camera types. If enabled, you will receive motion notifications for the camera
• Camera feeds have notification settings for doorbells only. If enabled, you will receive doorbell press notifications for the camera.

These function independently so you can enable just motion or just doorbell press notifications depending on how you want it to work.

[dgreif]

@jamesg311 this one good too?

[wondergit113]

I upgraded to 4.0.7 yesterday. I got 4 notifications on the Spotlight Cam Battery today, none of them had a screenshot attached. I got 1 notification on my Ring Video Doorbell 4 which did have a screenshot, but motion detection reliability has been poor (Ring app itself captured motion but Homebridge did not).

[dgreif]

@jamesg311 are snapshots working any better for you lately? I'd like to get this closed out, but want to make sure that battery cameras are performing adequately for snapshots

[wondergit113]

They’ve been working better, yes, but noticeably more so with the image compression which I saw from another issue you may be rolling back. I’ll close and reopen if it regresses to zero snapshots.

[dgreif]

@jamesg311 that's really interesting that it's been working better with the snapshot resizing. Do you have pretty slow internet/wifi?

[wondergit113]

It is interesting (and somewhat strange) as I have a 1GB fiber internet connection powered by 3 eero Pro mesh wifi routers. My bandwidth is crazy good and I have everything running off an iMac 27" 2016.

[dgreif]

That sounds like a completely sufficient setup 😂. Image resizing shouldn't have made that much of a difference if you have great bandwidth. Try the reverted version and see if it still works alright.