ActionTiles Support & Ideas Forum
Public Forum for ActionTiles Customers. Please use the Search Box and carefully browse the results to look for existing relevant Topics before opening a new Topic or Private Helpdesk Ticket.
Weather Underground API
I have a PWS (personal weather station) that feeds with the weather underground. I have my own station ID and API Key... is there any way I can get AT to show some of the information from the PWS?
Thank you!
Yes,
Create a stock Smart Weather Tile device in the ST IDE, then open your mobile app and specify your station ID in the preferences. Then, this device will display the reading from your station.
Share your favorite Weather Media Tiles?
This national weather radar is so far my most useful Media Tile. I configured it for 3x2 tile size. Someday I intend to have a front door camera Media Tile.
- If the image in a Post has been placed with a full URL link to the original; just right-click and choose "Copy image address."
- There might be enough clues in the address to find the source website so you can find variations, such as local weather.
- When posting, if you used the "<>" (HTML edit feature) to surround the URL of the image source with <pre> and </pre>, then the URL will be show in text instead of the image ... or try the "Code" Formatting option (under the paragraph symbol ¶).
Blue Iris: Cycle through cameras?
Within my LAN I have been able to successfully access my Blue Iris Streams from the Service using the method here. Replacing the "Short_Camera_Name" in this string with "Index"will display the full set of cameras in one screen. Is it possible to bring up the view which cycles through the cameras with some other name in place of "Short_Camera_Name"??? If so I have not been able to determine what that name is.......
Video not streaming after screensaver
I have a media tile that is streaming video from Blue Iris. I use Dakboard as a screen saver. This is running on an Amazon Fire tablet.
The media tile is not streaming after dismissing the screen saver (Dakboard). I have to maximize the media tile for the stream to resume.
Anyone had this problem? Any ideas for what I can try to fix this?
DLink Camera
I have been through the entire feed on using Action Tiles and a live video feed. I found lots of url suggestions, but none that I can get to work. I have 9 DLink cameras with various models that are all connected to my dviewcam dvr on my windows 10 pc. I can also view the camera feed from mydlink.com and the internal ip 192.168.x.x with the assigned user name and ip. I only want to add one of my cameras model DCS-6004L to the action tiles. However all of the url's I have tried fail to connect or even act like they will connect ie(http://192.168.x.x:80/video1.mjpg?&user=xxxx&pwd=xxxx) will not work in ie, chrome, firefox, edge or action tiles. I am not sure what I am missing, but I would appreciate any feedback from the community.
ActionPiXX - Photo slideshow Media Tiles
First, if this type of post isn't permitted please remove it, thank you.
I’m working on a simple application (it's free) that works like a web server for photos for ActionTiles. Basically you copy this application into a directory and point an ActionTiles Media Tile to the applications IP address. The Application will serve up either a specific requested photo, or if you specify random.jpg it will serve a random photo from the directory.
You can also (optionally) specify different directories for different tablets etc. So you could have vacation photos served to the kitchen tablet, while your spouse gets photos of the kids and the garage tablet shows hunting and car photos all while the ActionTiles media tile points to a single local Web URL.
Photos can be: jpg, jpeg, gif and png.
Example directory layout:
The Application Interface:
If anyone has an interest in this local photo server and wants to help in beta testing this please let me know.
I’m working on this in my spare time so response from me could be slow at times as I work full time.
What this program doesn’t do:
Slideshow the photos in sequence (they are randomly presented).
Access directories outside of its own directory.
Charge for it's use (It's beggar ware)
Have an Apple version.
Thank you,
Jay
Hikvision cameras for action tiles
This took me a while to figure out so I thought I would share. I have a number of Hikvision cameras around the house, I had a hard time getting them to display on Action tiles. All the literature said to do this:
http://username:password@ip/Streaming/channels/2/picture
The above did not work for me! Pasting the above worked great in a Chrome browser but not in IE or Edge. It didn't work at all in action tiles. I did not get any image either in My Media or on the panel.
I finally found something that worked... I had to encode the username and password into base64 and append to the end like this:
http://192.168.1.xx/streaming/channels/102/picture?auth=VGhpcyBpcyBqdXN0IGEgdGVzdA==
I added the part "?auth=" and then pasted in the encoded "username:password"
This worked great for pictures. I used this site for encoding: https://www.base64encode.org/
It works for video too but while I can see the video on the "My Media" test, I can't get it to display on the actual panel.
Any ideas? Overall, I'm very happy with this product and bought two licenses (one for each of my hubs).
Erik
Live Traffic travel time Tile! Image from query text using Shields.io
I thought I'd post this to help others. I figured out a way to display the travel time for my wife's commute to work. See the pink tile in the screenshot below...
I used a Google Maps Distance Matrix API call and displayed the result in a Shields.IO badge. (Check out http://shields.io) Then I added the whole darn deal to the My Media section in Action Tiles.
Here's the link I used, broken into pieces...
Base URL: https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json.svg
Badge Options (no label, pink color, time query, badge style): ?label= &colorA=ff69b4&colorB=ff69b4&prefix=&suffix=&query=$..duration_in_traffic.text&style=flat-square
Google Maps API call: &uri=https%3A%2F%2Fmaps.googleapis.com%2Fmaps%2Fapi%2Fdistancematrix%2Fjson%3Funits%3Dimperial%26departure_time%3Dnow%26origins%3D[origin address]%26destinations%3D[your destination address]%26key%3D[your API key]
You'll have to generate and use a Google API key and the URI has to be encoded with all those silly % escape codes. The Dynamic Generator at the bottom of the Shields.io page will help you out with the pieces. It was a bit of trial and error. Here's what it looks like all put together in the My Media image URL field...
https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json.svg?label= &colorA=ff69b4&colorB=ff69b4&prefix=&suffix=&query=$..duration_in_traffic.text&style=flat-square&uri=https%3A%2F%2Fmaps.googleapis.com%2Fmaps%2Fapi%2Fdistancematrix%2Fjson%3Funits%3Dimperial%26departure_time%3Dnow%26origins%3D[your origin address]%26destinations%3D[your destination address]%26key%3D[your API key]
As everything seems to be, it's a little bit of a hack (text not centered), and the image and text proportion is stretched/crunched from the original (just like weather maps, camera images, etc.) but it seems to be working pretty well. One of the cool things is that it's actually an SVG, so no quality is lost if you make the tile bigger or look at it in a full-screen view.
Hope this helps!
Help me to add a "valid url" in order to see Google Traffic as an Refresh still image?
So this is the URL i want to add so that it posts STILLS of the traffic nearby every X amount of seconds.
https://www.google.com.ec/maps/@-2.1674177,-79.8821124,5140m/data=!3m1!1e3!5m1!1e1?hl=es
Well, this is a bit hacky, but gets the job done for now in the way I need.
I use a local batch file to generate a screenshot of the desired google maps page using phantomjs
http://phantomjs.org/screen-capture.html
phantomjs traffic.js
Here is an example of a traffic.js file used by phantomjs:
var page = require('webpage').create();
//viewportSize being the actual size of the headless browser
page.viewportSize = { width: 1024, height: 1024 };
//the clipRect is the portion of the page you are taking a screenshot of
page.clipRect = { top: 200, left: 200, width: 800, height: 800 };
//the rest of the code is the same as the previous example
page.open('https://www.google.com/maps/@33.0062365,-96.8176253,11.31z/data=!5m1!1e1', function() {
page.render('traffic_raw.png');
phantom.exit();
});
Using ImageMagick tools, my batch file creates a watermark for the current time to apply to the traffic image, so I know when the map data was captured:
convert -size 300x50 xc:grey30 -font Arial -pointsize 20 -gravity center -draw "fill grey70 text 0,0 '%time%'" stamp_fgnd.png
convert -size 300x50 xc:black -font Arial -pointsize 20 -gravity center -draw "fill white text 1,1 '%time%' text 0,0 '%time%' fill black text -1,-1 '%time%'" +matte stamp_mask.png
composite -compose CopyOpacity stamp_mask.png stamp_fgnd.png stamp.png
mogrify -trim +repage stamp.png
composite -gravity north -geometry +0+10 stamp.png traffic_raw.png traffic.png
Then I have this file uploaded to a website (I just grabbed a free site at 000webhost.com) using curl.
curl -T c:\data\traffic.png ftp://username:password@files.000webhost.com/public_html/
I'll have the batch file run the above every 30 min.
and tell the tile to refresh every 15 min since the timing of the AT sync might not match with the timing of the batch file.
Here's the full screen version of the traffic tile (my AT is 3x3 and is a decent thumbnail of the full image):
tinyCam Pro Android App web server: Stream RTSP and Wyze Cam to ActionTiles!
After attempting to stream using Blue Iris (CPU on the server went through the roof), and not having any success using some of the other methods found here on the forum, I decided to give tinyCam a try.
There was another post that made a passing reference to the tinyCam webserver, so I installed the app on my Nexus 9, setup webserver and am now able to stream one of my outside security cams to a media tile.
Here's the media setup panel...
The problem I'm having is that I can't seem to address any of the other three cameras. There is supposedly a parameter to select a camera, but it's not working for me. Here's the request parameters from the Tinycam webserver API...
Perhaps there are others using tinyCam Pro Webserver that might share their experiences...
Demo / Tutorial Videos:
Our friend at TaylorTech (vlog) has added 2 YouTube tutorial/demo videos for this Topic:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Post LIVE World Wonder or Beautiful landscape MJPEGs or JPEGs here
I wanted to start a post about LIVE or CURRENT world wonder or vacation spot webcam images that update multiple times a day.
I have 2 to share:
University of Texas Tower:
St Peters Basilica:
CAN ANYONE FIND THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA? I'VE LOOKED FOR HOURS.
Nest Cam cameras
Has there been any progress made on using NEST cameras that are not Public in Actiontiles? My Actiontiles setup is so close to perfect but not having my camera feeds makes it fall just short. I am hoping there has been some progress in the last year.
We have done minimal research on this because video is not our area of expertise or focus. ActionTiles is firstly a "view & touch" browser-compatible dashboard control app for SmartThings. Media Tiles are a convenient bonus feature subject to the limitations of a web-app / browser viewer.
There are a few articles on the net which refer to either official APIs for Nest products and/or unofficial hacks.
We invite any tech savvy readers to develop "proofs-of-concept" which stream a Nest Cam in a plain browser window, iFrame, <img> or <video> embeds, and if the concept is sound, we would be inspired to explore it further.
A few example starting points:
- Official "no streaming API is available" per Nest: https://nestdevelopers.io/t/streaming-from-indoor-outdoor-cams/1074 - "Unfortunately there’s no way to directly stream the live camera feed within a non-Nest application using the Nest API. You have to redirect the user to one of the two browser options as you described (public_share_url or web_url)."
- https://dennisdel.com/blog/nest/ - This refers to a hack which grabs the stream for the purpose of self-cloud storage. However, it includes the use of "ffmpeg" which has real-time transcoding abilities, and could perhaps be used to serve an MJPEG to ActionTiles. The user would require a server (rPi, Linux, Windows?) on their network to do the transcoding.
- https://medium.com/@smhillin/connecting-to-nest-camera-api-and-getting-live-url-d69e58d093d
- https://www.binarypower.com/2017/02/record-google-nest-cam-from-blue-iris.html
Most likely feasible: 1 fps snapshots served via tinyCam Monitor Pro:
The clever developer of the Android App - tinyCam Monitor Pro is the only application which supports logging into and streaming Wyze Cams; even though tinyCam has open sourced the unofficial API they discovered & used:
Well, tinyCam Monitor also supports Nest Cam but, consistent with the API limitations described above), only at a maximum of 1 frame-per-second. In other words, it probably grabs JPEG snapshots and assembles them into a stream. Since tinyCam Monitor Pro can transcode to MJPEG by spinning up internal web server, this stream should embed into ActionTiles just like Wyze Cam - including basic user/password protection.
- Here is the list of tinyCam supported cameras: https://tinycammonitor.com/support.html
If similar to Wyze, then tinyCam must use your Nest credentials to login to your camera(s). This has certain risks, since you can't be 100% certain tinyCam doesn't leak your credentials or use them to access other functions of your Nest Account (thermostat, security, etc.). Whether this is more or less secure overall than just using a public live view of each Nest Cam, is up to you to decide.
The various examples above may be somewhat more direct in accessing JPG snapshots from a Nest Cam - but they are non-trivial. tinyCam is most feasible because we already know that it "gets the job done" (imperfectly) for Wyze Cam and local RTSP cameras, so I'm rather confident if they claim Nest works, it will work.
You can run the tinyCam Monitor Pro Android App on the same tablet as ActionTiles (though that does not increase efficiency and can hurt tablet performance), or on another Android tablet, Android emulator, or Android TV Box. I am currently testing this $36 low-end S904W based Android TV box with tinyCam (for 2 Wyze Cams), and so far the results aren't bad. I'll write up my results in more detail if the configuration turns out to be stable.
So... Why not give tinyCam Monitor Pro a try?
...Terry.
Time Zone offset needed for MTG weather (behind by one day)
First, I love this app. But, the mtg weather tile is always a day behind. Today, is April 9 and the tile starts on April 8. Is there something I missed in the config.
I've changed this into a Feature Request.
The MTG module is distinct from the rest of ActionTiles because it is a set of PHP scripts (vs Javascript, etc. for the app). We'll have to experiment to see if just adding a parameter and a few calculations has the desired effect. We'll keep this post updated with any progress.
Thanks,
...Terry.
Netatmo Camera on media tiles???
Hi Guys, first post and a complete newbie, so apologies if this is a silly question....
I am trying to get my Netatmo Welcome to display on a media tile.... As I say I am a complete novice so am not entirely sure this is possible. I have followed the steps detailed in the link below assuming it will work in a similar fashion with Action Tiles, firstly my question is am I barking up the wrong tree... As I say my knowledge is limited so apologies if I am being naive..
https://www.domoticz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15124
Secondly if by some miracle I am on the right track, why would I get a blank tile with "loading" in it? I have tried both a live stream and snapshot options but both return the same.
Any help or advice would be really appreciated
Axis camera viewing with user&pwd
i hve had AT working with axis cameras for a while. The problem is the axis companion app does not allow for anonymous viewing. How can i add the user and pwd to my media tile url?
Please List your Camera brand here if you got it working
Since the rtsp support seems to be on hold for now I had to return the second camera I ordered on Amazon. But I managed to make one of my old camera work.
PLEASE list the exact brand for your camera here if you can confirm it works for you. This will help others with the new purchases.
Please list the http mask (URL format) you used.
Amazon purchase link also very much appreciated.
Feel free to add sreenshots to your camera tile too.
Blink camera integration feature request
the Rboy blink app has been updated which says it will allow action tiles to show images from cameras. can this be added to action tiles so we can see the latest image from the cameras in a panel?
it would be great, since it already takes an image when it sees motion, then ideally the tile in the panel would refresh with the latest image. streaming on demand, like you can in the blink app or from ST, would be great, but also a hazard for battery life.
Amazon has acquired Blink, and shortly before the acquisition, Blink pulled all direct SmartThings integrated support and related APIs.
At this time, there is no indication from Amazon as to what they will be doing with the product line and what sort of 3rd party integrations they will provide (except IFTTT), if any. Integration opportunities for small companies is often not aligned with that of larger vendors. Amazon would perhaps first introduce an official integration with SmartThings, given the intersecting popularity of the products ... but that's just a guess. Perhaps Amazon wishes to keep the system closed for security and/or to protect their other strategic smart home plans.
Until the merger and Blink's products evolve accordingly, we are putting aside ("Deferring") this Topic indefinitely.
Latest News...
The Blink Forum may be the best place to advocate and follow developments in this regard. No one has more influence over Blink than their Customers ... right?
Reolink Camera?
Is the Reolink camera supported by Action Tiles?
I can see from their support that a JPEG image from the camera does have a URL address....so I'm assuming the answer is yes?
https://reolink.com/faq/get-url-of-jpeg-image-captured-reolink-camera/
Thanks,
Kevin
I bought 2 Reolink cameras last week and tested one. They do work with Action Tiles and all is well. I haven't decided whether to connect them to Smartthings, because Reolink's software is pretty good about motion detection and alerts.
Thanks,
Kevin
Severe weather alert tile
Is there a way to build a severe weather tile that uses the smart weather station data from my ST hub?
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