Summary

Recently we had an incident where we received a notification on our phone saying a package was delivered, 5 minutes later my wife went to get it and it was not there. After emailing back and forth with the company that sent us the package, bottom line was, their driver had a photo saying that it was delivered so they can't do anything about it.

After getting over the frustration that incident had caused, I decided it is time to install some security cameras. We live in a townhouse where we are not allowed to install anything on the outside without a lengthy permit process. That limited my options to indoor only camera, luckily for me, i have a little glass window right beside my front door where i can point the camera though to cover my front yard through. 

Before buying a proper camera, I wanted to test what can be done with an old iPhone 6S phone I had sitting in my drawer. As always, Homebridge was there to the rescue 😊. In this post i will share how i configured "Homebridge Camera Ui" plugin to use my old phone as a security camera in Apple Home App. 

Setting up Homebridge

• Download and install for your platform here: https://homebridge.io

  • I have it installed on my Synology NAS

• Once installed, you should be able to access your homebridge via http://localhost:8581/

• In the plugins page search for "Homebridge Camera Ui"

• Once installed and Homebridge is restarted, lets configure the plugin

I didn't change anything in the interface section, but this is where you would change the port of the plugin on enable debug for the plugin in case you need to troubleshoot something

In the "Branding", you can give you can put anything you want, this is the camera details that will show in Apple Home App.