Motion Sensor on Ring Cameras and Notifications

[jjknudsen]

I had been wrestling with the fact that the Motion Sensors on my Ring cameras weren't registering any detected motion in HA when I realized that it was due to the Motion Schedules I had created in the Ring app. Basically, I don't want any kid of people or motion alerts on any of my devices during the daytime so I have Motion Schedules setup to turn alerts off at 6AM and back on at 11PM.

I do however, want to use the Motion Sensors in HA for some automations. Initially those sensors were not registering any motion until I realized that if I turn off my Motion Scheudule the sensor will start registering motion in HA.

So, now with the Motion Schedules deleted/disabled, the only way I figured out to silence notifications on my phone but KEEP the motion sensors in HA working is toggle off the Motion Alerts option for every camera. This seems to keep the motion sensors firing in HA, but silence the notifications on my phone.

I guess I figured that with the Motion Schedules turned on, the Motion Sensors would still fire in HA because the camera event history still logs the motion it just doesn't alert on it. I'm guessing the Ring MQTT integration is relying on notifcations for the motion sensors. There doesn't appear to be any way to setup "client side" alert schedules that keep notifications flowing to other devices, but disables them for that particular client (like my phone).

TL;DR Is there any way to have the Motion Sensors in HA fire whenever motion is detected, while still setting my other devices (like my phone) to get notifications from the Ring App only at night?

[tsightler]

It's written in multiple places in the documentation, including the FAQ and troubleshooting sections of the wiki, as well as dozens of posts in the discussion forums and issues pages, that using any Ring features which suppress notifications will prevent ring-mqtt from being able to detect those events as well. I'm not sure how it could be made more clear, but I'm open to suggestions.

The easiest way to think about it is that ring-mqtt is just a different phone with the Ring app installed. If you had motion schedules enabled, that schedule would prevent both phones from getting event notifications.

Ring cameras are not motion sensors, they are cameras that generate events, and the only method Ring provides to get real time events is via push notifications. Yes, the events are still in the history, but this requires polling for those events, and polling the Ring API is slow and subject to throttling and not very friendly to Ring resources, increasing the changes Ring blocks projects like this at some point in the future. We do our best to behave as good API consumers.

The alternative is to use HA notifications instead of Ring notifications. This way, HA always gets notifications, but you can setup an automation to notify only in the time ranges you wish. This is beyond the scope of this group, but there's plenty of examples of time of day based notifications of HA in the HA forums.

[jjknudsen]

The way it all works makes perfect sense. For whatever reason, and I honestly don't know why I didn't realize this, it didn't occur to me that the Motion Schedules would prevent the push notifications to go to Ring MQTT in addition to my phones.

For what it's worth, I spent a lot of time Googling and searching, but Motion Schedules never popped up as what would cause this. You are right regarding the documentation, I just didn't link the issue back to the Motion Schedules. Not sure why I didn't, I just...didn't...even after a few hours of tinkering and trying to figure things out (including stopping the add-on, removing the session from the Control Center, reauthenticating, etc).

I posted this as a Discussion question rather than filing an issue once I realized WHY it was behaving the way that it was. I guess I was hoping to find out if there was any way to meet both of my objectives of Motion Notifications in Ring MQTT while not having daytime notifications on my device. I understand that's not achievalbe given how this all works.

I VERY much appreciate your work and taking the time to resonpd to me