Home Assistant P2PCam

Home assistant component to retrieve camera images from cameras using the p2p protocol

First of all i just wrote the original connection and retrieval process has been made by Jheyman in his videosurveillance script. I rewrote it to run as a class instead of an application and added the home assitant code to it.

So i had this chinese camera laying around, it had this feature that you could access it from outside your home without the need for port forwarding. However after a couple of years this brand dissappeared and with it their services so i couldn't connect to it outside of my own network using this app.

Which made owning this camera quite useless. But i had since gotten into Home Asssistant and got the idea to get it working in there since my instance ran locally so it should be able to access the camera.

Installation

Place these files:

• camera.py
• manifest.json

In <config directory>/custom_components/p2pcam/.

Once this is done you can move on to configuring it.

camera:
  - platform: p2pcam
    name: <camera name>
    host: <the ip address of your home assistant>
    ip_address: <the ip address of your camera>

e.g.

camera:
  - platform: p2pcam
    name: ontop
    host: 192.168.178.5
    ip_address: 192.168.178.9

The connection method of these cameras seem quite dodgy so it may take a little while sometimes for the image to be fetched. This will no longer be a problem once a connection has been established and the stream is being received.

Disclaimer

I am not an experienced python or home assistant component developer. This is one of my first projects for this, i would love feedback and Pull requests to improve this and maybe even get it into the core.

To Do

• I used to have support for a timestamp and flipping and rotating the image using the CV2 library. Since home assistant 0.92 i could not get this to work since i could not find the correct library to require.