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Control the camera from Home Assistant (MQTT)

Why did I change this

Normally you change camera settings — turn the status LED off, switch the night vision (IR) on, mute the microphone — from the Yi phone app, which goes through the cloud. We wanted to do all of that locally, from your own smart home, with no cloud involved.

yi-hack-v6 publishes the camera to Home Assistant over MQTT. The camera shows up automatically as a device with switches you can flip, and it reports its status back so Home Assistant always shows the real state.

What you get

  • Control the camera from Home Assistant (or any MQTT client) — no cloud, no app.
  • A full set of controls, including ones the old versions didn't expose: camera on/off, status LED, IR (night vision), microphone mute, image rotate, motion detection, AI person/vehicle/animal detection, face detection, motion tracking, sound detection, plus sensitivity and cruise as drop-downs.
  • Motion and sound events appear in Home Assistant too, so you can build automations (e.g. "turn on a light when the camera sees a person").
  • Listening to the camera's microphone in Home Assistant works through the normal video stream (see the note at the end).

How to set it up

Everything is in the web interface, under the MQTT pages:

  1. Connect the camera to your MQTT broker. On the MQTT page, enable MQTT and fill in your broker's address, port and (if needed) username/password. Make sure Remote configuration is left on — it's what lets Home Assistant send commands to the camera.

  2. Turn on Home Assistant auto-discovery. On the MQTT Advertise page, enable Home Assistant discovery and the Camera Settings entities. The camera will announce itself; it appears automatically in Home Assistant as a device with all its switches and controls.

  3. Use it. Open the device in Home Assistant and flip the switches. Changes take effect on the camera immediately, and the state shown in Home Assistant follows the real camera state.

You can also change these same settings directly from the camera's own web interface, on the Camera settings page (including the new Microphone on/off).

About audio

  • Hearing the camera (mic → Home Assistant): already works. Enable audio on the video stream (RTSP) and Home Assistant / Frigate / go2rtc will carry the sound. The Microphone switch controls whether the mic is live.

  • Talking through the camera (your voice → camera speaker): works out of the box on the native video pipeline (Pipeline = online/offline). The stream advertises an ONVIF-style audio backchannel (G.711), which Home Assistant's built-in go2rtc uses to show a microphone / talk button on the camera card — press it and speak, and the sound comes out of the camera speaker. The speaker amplifier is powered only while you are talking, so there is no idle hiss. Requires a model whose speaker hardware is mapped in the firmware (y20 for now); on the stock pipeline this is not available.

    The talk channel is part of the RTSP stream, so it is protected by the stream's own login and nothing else: if you leave the RTSP user and password empty, anyone who can reach the camera can speak through its speaker.