Send Reolink doorbell notifications with Home Assistant

This walkthrough connects a Reolink PoE doorbell to Home Assistant and sends a phone notification with the camera feed when someone presses the button.

It builds on our Home Assistant introduction and first automation.

Why use a local camera integration?

A local integration gives you more control over how the camera feed is used. You can build notifications in Home Assistant instead of relying on the camera provider's app and remote storage service.

Reports documented Ring account exposure and sharing footage with police without a warrant. These reports are reasons to examine where footage goes and who can access it, rather than assume that any particular setup is secure by default.

Here we will focus on one useful action: seeing who is at the door when the button is pressed.

Connect the doorbell

Prerequisites

• A working Home Assistant installation

• The Reolink integration, configured as described below

• The Home Assistant app installed and logged in to your installation

Create and download a configuration backup before changing the setup:

• Settings > System > Backups > Create Backup

Connect the PoE doorbell to a suitable PoE switch or injector so it has both power and a network connection. Then open Settings > Devices & Services in Home Assistant. You should see the Reolink integration waiting to be configured.

Set a password for the camera before configuring the integration. Note the IP address on the pending integration and open it in another browser tab. Mine was 192.168.1.182. The camera web interface should open. Follow its initial account setup instructions; the camera used for this walkthrough initially accepted the username admin with a blank password.

Click the settings wheel in the top right corner.

Whilst you're here, visit the 'Info' tab on the left and give your camera the appropriate name. This will make it easier to find in Home Assistant later on.

Now, head to System > User Management and click the 'Change Password' button. Use a unique password and store it in a password manager. You will need it when configuring the Home Assistant integration. Use a separate account for Home Assistant if possible. It needs admin privileges for this integration, as described in the Reolink integration prerequisites.

Return to Home Assistant and you should now see that the integration has updated the camera name to whatever you changed it to in the camera settings. Refresh the page if you don't see that. Click the 'Configure' button, give the user and password credentials you just set up and click 'Save'. You'll now see the Reolink integration amongst your others, with 1 Device adopted.

Open the device entry to inspect its sensors and controls.

Once that's done, click the blue '+' icon next to Automations on the left.

Choose the event you want to trigger the notification:

• Motion detection can include passing vehicles or other movement.
• Person detection narrows the alerts, but can still include people passing the house. In my testing, cyclists also triggered it.
• A doorbell press is a more specific signal that someone wants your attention.

For this walkthrough, use the doorbell press.

The Reolink integration calls someone pressing the physical doorbell button 'Visitor mode' so we want to find the option in the 'Do something when' section called 'CameraName Visitor turned on.' Clicking this will take us to the New Automation page with the right 'When' condition already filled in.

Under the 'Then do' section, click '+ ADD ACTION.' Scroll down to select the 'Notifications' category, then find the entry which ends in 'mobile_app_your_phone_name' and click on it. For example, my phone is named JJ15, so my entry is highlighted below.

Set whatever Title and Message content you'd like, these will give the camera feed some context.

The camera feed comes from entity_id: camera.frontdoor_fluent. In the Home Assistant editor, type camera. to see the available entities and choose your doorbell's lower-resolution feed. Reolink labels this feed fluent; it is enough for a small notification window.

The example also includes sticky and priority options. Notification behaviour varies by phone platform, so test it on the devices you use.

Here is the notification on my iPhone.

On my Apple Watch, the notification also includes the feed.

Here's our whole automation in YAML format:

alias: Doorbell Notification
description: "Send a mobile app notification when the doorbell is pressed"
trigger:
  - type: turned_on
    platform: device
    device_id: your_device_id_here
    entity_id: your_visitor_entity_id_here 
    domain: binary_sensor
condition: []
action:
  - service: notify.mobile_app_jj_15
    metadata: {}
    data:
      title: Ding Dong!
      message: "Someone's at the door!"
      data:
        sticky: "true"
        priority: high
        entity_id: camera.frontdoor_fluent
mode: single

Further changes to try

Once the basic notification works, you could try:

• Sending it to other members of the household.
• Adding a condition so a particular notification only runs when you are home.
• Sending a snapshot instead of a live feed when you are away. A still image uses less data, which may help on a mobile connection.

Contact us by email if you want help adapting the automation.