tessera
All plugins
Screen camera plugin preview

Screen camera

The screen's own camera as a camera in Home Assistant, with a camera in the top bar while it is watched.

By MaxGramser · v0.2.0

Needs Built-in camera, PSRAM on the screen.

View on GitHub How to add a plugin
No rating yetRatings come from people who run it, in the Tessera app
0people like it, some without running it
0homes use it, of those who share that

See the screen's own camera in Home Assistant. The screen becomes a camera of its device there: a picture on a dashboard, a stream when you open it, and anything Home Assistant does with a camera (a snapshot in an automation, a recording).

The picture is made on the screen in hardware, only while Home Assistant asks for one. While it does, a camera shows in the screen's top bar, so whoever stands in front of it knows.

What you need

  • A screen whose board has a camera that Tessera knows how to power and reach: the reTerminal D1001 or the M5Stack Tab5.
  • Nothing else in Home Assistant: the camera comes with the screen's device in the ESPHome integration.

Set up

  1. In Tessera, open Plugins, choose Screen camera and tick your screens. Each screen builds once with it.
  2. In Home Assistant, open the screen's device (Settings, Devices): its camera is there as Camera. Put it on a dashboard with a Picture entity or a Picture glance card.
  3. Optional: add Camera in use to a page's top bar (Top bar, Add, From plugins). It shows while pictures leave the screen: "Live" for a stream, "Camera" for a picture now and then.

Privacy

Nothing leaves the screen until Home Assistant asks for a picture, and every picture goes only to your Home Assistant. Everyone who can open the screen's device or a dashboard with its camera can see through it. To stop that for a while, disable the camera entity in Home Assistant; to stop it for good, remove the plugin from the screen.

For makers

The camera is ESPHome's camera with id ts_camera (the feature camera), so another plugin can build on it. The camera driver is esp_video_camera (github.com/n-IA-hane/esphome-esp-video-camera, from ESPHome pull request esphome/esphome#16944), copied unchanged into components/esp_video_camera under the ESPHome License, with its NOTICE.