homebridge-website-to-camera

Homebridge plugin for displaying a Website (intended for Google Maps-->Traffic) as Camera

If you find my work useful you can buy me a coffee, I am very thankful for your support.

Installation

Make sure you have homebridge installed.

1. Download the latest Chromium sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
2. Verify the Chromium installation by running chromium-browser, output should be similar to (chromium-browser:30533): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display
3. Install this plugin using: sudo npm install -g homebridge-website-to-camera
4. Update your Homebridge config.json using the sample below (append in the block 'platforms' not 'accessories')

Configuration

Update your config similar to this:

"platforms": [
      {
         "platform": "website-camera",
         "cameras": [
            {
               "name": "Website 1",
               "url": "http://github.com",
               "chromiumPath": "/usr/bin/chromium-browser"
            }
         ]
      }
   ]

You can add multiple cameras!

Config file

Take a look at the example config.json

Fields:

• name name of the camera (required)
• id unique(!) identifier for that specific camera (optional)
• url the URL of the website that is to be captured (required)
• scale HomeApp requests an (probably device dependent) size for the preview-image.With e.g. scale set to 2 (default) the virtual browser window is set to this size. Best is to skip this field.
• OR width / height the width/height of the virtual browser window. This is optional and overrides scale.
• chromiumPath path to chromium-executable (defaults to "/usr/bin/chromium-browser")
• timeout timeout in ms for waiting until the page has no more pending requests. resembles to puppeteer.goto() (defaults to 10000 --> 10s)
• renderTimeout timeout in ms for waiting AFTER the page has loaded before taking the screenshot. userful for PWAs. (defaults to 1ms)
• ignoreHTTPSErrors ignore HTTPS errors, useful for self-signed certificates (defaults to false)

Usage

In some cases, the camera is not visible in Home-App:

• Press + on top right corner in Home-App
• Press Add device
• Press Code missing
• Select Camera

Background

The plugin uses Puppeteer/Chrome headless to capture the screenshots. The Browser instance stays open all the time for better performance and less CPU/Mem consumption.

TODO

• Live-Video not working. As far as I understood HomeKit requires an RTSP-stream where it can connect to. So this feature might not come at all.