Send Camera Pics When Doorbell Pressed?

thomjw

Hi all,
I need to have Security Spy send pics via a text message to my cell phone from one camera when someone presses the house doorbell. Note that I am running Security Spy 3.04, and Indigo 6.1.8 on the mac. The doorbell connects to a triggerlinc, that sends an open/close signal into Indigo. I have it set up so that Indigo DOES send me a text message to my cell phone right now whenever someone presses my doorbell. I just need a way to get pics from the camera outside the front door that records continuously into Security Spy. I want to see who is at my front door ringing the doorbell when I am not at home. Right now, when I am not home, I get the text message that the doorbell is ringing, I can't look on my phone to see who is at the door. This should be a simple thing, but I can't figure it out? -Thanks

Ben

SecuritySpy integrates with Indigo via the Cynical SecuritySpy Plugin. Using this plugin, Indigo can send events to SecuritySpy (e.g. to simulate motion and trigger SecuritySpy's Motion Capture and Actions). However I don't think there would be an easy way to instantly see an image of the event with your current setup, because you are using a rather old version of SecuritySpy that doesn't have such features.

To achieve what you want, the best option would be to upgrade to the latest version of SecuritySpy. When combined with our SecuritySpy iOS app, you can set this up to receive instant notifications of events that contain images.

These events are sent from SecuritySpy on macOS to SecuritySpy on iOS, so you would not need to use Indigo's own notification feature for this. These notifications can then be triggered based on SecuritySpy's own motion detection (e.g. when someone walks towards the door, which has the advantage of generating an action before they actually press the doorbell), and/or from Indigo via the Cynical plugin (e.g. when someone presses the doorbell).

Note that SecuritySpy v5 requires macOS 10.13 or later. If your Mac cannot run this system, then you might like to consider using SecuritySpy v4 instead, which works on macOS 10.7 or later, and also has the notification features described above.

If you don't want to upgrade to SecuritySpy v4 or v5 for any reason, there may be a solution using AppleScript - check out the Send iMessage AppleScript example. However I can't guarantee that this will work with your old version of SecuritySpy.