Products: UCG-Max
USW-flex-2.5-8-PoE
UACC-210W
UNVR-instant-4TB
Result: 2.5 gig network, 12 total 2.5 gig ports, 8x 2.5gig PoE ports
4TB NVR
I kinda love the idea of the Relay product. I have been using similar Shelly devices already; they work great.
I bought a few Relays, assuming I would figure out fun, interesting, useful places to integrate them into my Excessive Overkill Unifi installation. The first and most obvious choice was the driveway gate. Being able to see who is at the gate, and then open it remotely was tantalizing.
So I installed it. I can activate it from anywhere on the property. Wonderful.
Then I, the admin, tried to give my partner the ability to open the gate as well, since she loves the new cameras monitoring who is arriving.
Nope. Fail.
Product Design Fail.
The only way a Human can operate the gate is if they have Full Admin Privileges. What? No, that’s silly. I must be missing something. Nope. Users and Members can’t open a gate, or a garage door, or turn on a light. Only Admins can do operate the Relays.
I think I can set up an alarm that reads my car’s license plate, and opens the gate for me… but my partner can’t let a delivery truck in… because she’s not an Admin.
Skynet is Active. We humans are a secondary concern.
What’s next?
“Can I use your WiFi?”
“Sure, let me create an account and give you full Administrative Privileges. Try not to erase the network.”
At the Local Restaurant:
“I’d like to buy lunch.”
“Ok, but before you pay us, we’ll need to give you the keys to all the restaurant staff’s houses and the pink slips to all our cars.”
Customer Support kindly took my “enhancement request” for the future, but there is no plan to address my concern.
Grab ‘em.
I know when the mailman comes because my AI Pro and G4 Doorbell Pro would capture a motion event for the postal vehicle. There are times when the postal vehicle isn't detected or captured via the vehicle tab. I have to use the all motion events tab to see if the mailman dropped off the mail.
I recently added 2 G6 PTZs on both corners of my house that face the street One is pointed at my driveway, but the FOV covers the mailbox that's around 30-50 ft from my house. Even if the Ubiquiti AI misses the vehicle for whatever reason. I can still see if the mailman came by using the person events tab in the app. His motion will be detected and recorded around the mailbox.
I know... it's ugly. 😅
I wanted to integrate devices that the UniFi Door Hub doesn't support natively, so I attached an ESP32 running ESPHome to it.
Current integrations:
- Nuki door opener
- Ring contact sensors
- Home Assistant automation
- G6 Pro Entry as the main door station
The ESP32 basically bridges everything into the UniFi ecosystem. The wiring definitely isn't pretty, and it's more of a proof of concept than a finished product, but it's been surprisingly reliable.
Future plans:
- Alarm system integration
- More Home Assistant entities
- Clean up the hardware (maybe 😄)
If it's stupid but it works... is it really stupid?
Edit what does it do xD:
So I have a UniFi Door Hub at my front door but all my actual smart home stuff lives in Home Assistant. The problem: UniFi doesn't talk to HA, and HA doesn't talk to UniFi. They're completely separate ecosystems.
So I flashed a $4 ESP32 with ESPHome and turned it into a dumb but effective translator sitting between the two - currently doing:
Thing 1 – Door sensor mirror:
My Ring door sensor reports open/closed to HA. The ESP32 reads that state and physically simulates a door contact sensor for the UniFi Hub by pulling a GPIO pin high or low. UniFi thinks it has a real wired door sensor. It doesn't. It's just a microcontroller lying to it.
Thing 2 – Lock trigger:
When I hit "Unlock" in the UniFi app, the Hub closes a dry contact output for a second. The ESP32 detects that on another GPIO pin and immediately calls lock.open on my Nuki Smart Lock through the HA API. UniFi thinks it's controlling a wired electric strike. It's actually just poking Home Assistant to tell Nuki to unlatch.
The result:
UniFi Access works as a proper access control system with real door state and unlock functionality, while all the actual logic and hardware stays in HA where I want it.
From the outside it looks like a proper wired electric strike setup — but it's just the Nuki doing its thing. A real electric lock installation isn't even an option in my situation, so this gets me all the same benefits: face recognition auto-unlock, pressing unlock mid-call when someone rings the bell through the UniFi Access app, the whole deal.
Thought I’d show off my custom doorbell that i have been building. Yes, I know I could have used a UniFi Protect one but it’s more fun making it yourself. (I am using UniFi protect camera for video & talk back)
It gives me a phone call, where you can hear, see and talk back through UniFi Protect camera kinda like you can do in the app but on a phone call
It was hard to get UniFi protect camera to support native streaming in a custom app but I have managed to decode the web socket that comes into the app normally so it adds little to no latency!!
Thought some of you would be interested
I did a video talk about the code -
https://youtu.be/P4YjMxAk5-Y
I also have all the code on GitHub -
https://github.com/thomasdye12/GatePhone-Concept
You pull up to a restaurant you see a unifi access point. you open up your UniFi app and you see
My little work in progress, just updated the switch to a new generation
In the rack,
Udm-pro (one of the first units)
Usw-24-hd-poe
Unas pro
Unvr pro
2 servers one for vm’s and the other one is dedicated home assistant
Planning to get the ups (probably wait for a bigger version) and get a ups-rps, we have two circuits behind the server rack :)
Also want to get some unifi ocd panels
First, why are the Flair options so horrible? I couldn't find one that would suit. Is this something the mods can fix?
Over the last 6 months I'd been using a UNVR-Instant and posting about how I'd gone way beyond their recommendations for cameras and it was working great. I'd even posted asking people what I should be looking at to find deficiencies. I was running well over double their recommendation and I was finding performance of video playback, etc to be just fine. I was using a 12 TB WD Purple Pro drive.
When the UNVR-G2 came out I was interested in it for the extra AI features but at first didn't see enough reason to buy one. Finding out that the early ones were coming with 16 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB seemed like a deal and I love a deal. So after waiting weeks for stock to become available I bought one (and got the 16 GB) and have been running it for nearly a week now. I also couldn't find anybody that could give me real world experience of moving from the Instant to a G2 so I decided to find out for myself and share.
I had been having problems with my G6 PTZ cameras failing to respond to PTZ commands or just behaving erratically. E.g. a tap to move caused the camera to keep going until it hit the limit. I've been working with UI to debug this but so far I've mainly only gotta possible reasons but no clear answer. One thing that did come up was the overloaded UNVR-Instant could be the problem but I'm still waiting on an answer as to why. I have a feeling that the PTZ commands to start and to stop are managed by the UNVR instead of by the camera, so if the UNVR is busy it may not send the stop command. But that's just a theory.
Since moving most of my cameras to the UNVR G2 the erratic movements have stopped BUT there has also been firmware updates, one mentioning addressing some PTZ issues. I still do have G6 PTZs that just stop responding to PTZ commands. Rebooting ether the camera or the NVR will fix this for a while.
So, I wanted to come back here and post my experience and let people know that although it seems OK to overload the UNVR-Instant by a factor of two, you might want to avoid doing so if you have PTZ cameras. Beyond that I saw no other problems that were unique to the UNVR-Instant.
Now on to some other experience differences between the 2 UVNRs. Other than the AI features, there's not much to speak of. Certainly the UNVR-G2 is specced for 5X the number of cameras, it has a lot more RAM and CPU power, capacity for 4 drives, but I'm really not seeing any user experience performance differences between the 2 UNVRs at this time. There will be a point where the G2 will handle more cameras than the Instant, but even with 16 cameras the Instant was doing well. I truly believe the UNVR-Instant is a great NVR and for many it is all we need. Don't discount it because of the low recommended camera count or because it looks like consumer grade gear, it's likely capable of more than you expect. I'm still running mine.
BTW, that deal of getting more RAM? Well, so far my UVNR-G2 is only using 5 GB so an 8 GB model would be fine for me and the extra 8 to get 16 GB buys me nothing so far.
I've received now my 3rd G180 camera on RMA and just after mounting it, one night rain and it's full of water. Not even just moisture like the last 2, full on water.
Has anyone ever got their camera to work outside and I am just unlucky or this model is broken completely. So far RMA works but in 3 months 3 cameras and changing cameras every time it rains seems pretty bad.
Completely brand new, unopened.
I have 3. I opened the first one and put it to use in the yard.
These just aren't for me. I'm trying to cover too much area with it.
$350 each, shipped
Rajout pour avoir du wifi de qualité partout en extérieur de ma U7 pro Outdoor , quel bonheur ce matos de fou ! 💙🤩💙🤩💙
Just wanted to double check before I placed order. Note: I already own a udm pro SE and the UNVR, just added to the cart for the purpose of showing the full set up. Any suggestions is appreciated, thanks!
I think something is wrong with the vape detection. Is it detecting aerosolized oil?
I was about to get the device bridge switch until I saw the price tag of $300. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cheaper to simply get the flex switch for $99 and a device bridge for $99? Sure I wouldn’t have the POE capability I need is to power a camera and a floodlight
If this won’t work, does anyone else have a better solution?
Installed a UCG Max and two APs a year or so ago at my parent’s house. It was my first UniFi install, and after doing so, I went all in on UniFi for my house.
They recently had a detached garage built with a workshop space and wanted to have an additional AP installed. I decided the best route was to use the USW Flex POE for each “side” of the network and connect the two via fiber.
The install was super easy! Bought a pre-terminated fiber line and SFP modules from FS.com. The AC Pro was used; I bought it off Facebook a year or so ago, and it booted right up.
I went with the USW Flex POE because I am eventually going to convert all their Google/Nest cameras to UniFi POE cameras. They saw how nice the cameras are and Protect app is for my house… hopefully I can finish that project by the end of the year!
Notes: Yes there is 12/2 running next to the CAT cables in the workshop network cutout, it’s cause we forget to install an outlet inside the cutout… I’ll report if it has any significant impacts to the network. I also forgot to bring my RJ45 boots, so I used some electrical tape to create a “boot” for the cables. Not ideal, but it works.
Trying to figureYd out how to connect the boathouse (circled in red) to the main house. I've done Unifi installs before, but have not used DB or BB products before. Distance is about 70 yards. Owner previously had used an EnGenius 802.11ac link.
Good day Y'all.
I have installed a ton of NVRs and adopted a ton of 3rd party cameras from all brands successfully.
But this time, Client had a HikVision recorder, which I removed and replaced with UNVR with 3 X 12TB Purple drives.
He has 7 old but fully functional cameras they are Flir labeled but Digimerge in the background :
I have full access to the Web GUI with admin/admin ( reset for now during test ). I have ONVIF activated in the cameras.
UNVR Protect detects all cameras, I hit ADOPT, enter the admin/admin but it says wrong credentials. I tried all cameras, all reset to default with ONVIF activated and admin/admin.
I also tried to add another user to the cameras and use those credentials in UNVR Protect, same problem.
I tried with Chome and Edge.
I told the client we will probably have to replace the cameras.
I contacted Lorex ( who used to be with Flir), Flir, Tried Digimerge, Dahua. No one has any firmwares for me.
Anyone has any ideas ?
