Does BLRing still work for anyone?

[avpman]

Bob is this plugin still supported?

+1

[w.vuyk]

Guess not after a year of no responses?

[Blade]

I have looked at it a couple times but I have been busy with other things
I did post the source code for it if anyone wants to look into it
What I would really like is for Ring to make their API public and then I think it would be easier to keep working
I don't think they plan to ever do this

[avpman]

I have looked at it a couple times but I have been busy with other things
I did post the source code for it if anyone wants to look into it
What I would really like is for Ring to make their API public and then I think it would be easier to keep working
I don't think they plan to ever do this

There is an "unofficial" API https://github.com/dgreif/ring

[dcorsus]

I've had a ring doorbell for quite a while but recently added more ring devices such as flood lights and thinking of retiring my (amcrest/blue iris based) cameras around the house.
Was looking at what plugin support is available, but as far as I can tell, the only one is Blade 's BLRing but seems to be unsupported going foward.

Read up on some of the github projects and thought about rolling my own but I'm really curious why Blade's project was abandoned. Was it the continous changes to the API, the unreliable server implemention, where (as far as I can tell), you need to continously poll the service to find out if there were events.

I reached out to HomeSeer to see if they are interested in doing this as an open source project, but they are not.

Given I have only doorbells and floodlight camera's, my need would be relative small. So before I put more of my own effort in this project, there are a few avenues:

1. I believe Blade provided the source, we can start from there, but I believe it is HS3 native, so might require a good bit of work to make this HS4 native. Also not sure why it was abandoned as it look very comprehensive in functions, perhaps too much?
2. We start a new open source project, put on Git, but will there really be active participants? It is still quite a bit of effort to manage an open source project, it all sounds so good on paper, but if you only have a handfull of people who have the obsession and capability to freely contribute, it tend to go nowhere. People look at open source projects that have litterly thousands of interested users, not to realize that these are maintained by only a handfull of developers who tend to dedicate their life supporting the project for free.
3. Roll my own, free or for pay, either way, a ton of work and I did the "for free" part in the past and you'd be amazed about the audacity some users have, acting that it is your fault around their ineptitude to use something that is for free.

So would like to hear some thoughts. I really didn't take me very long to code up the authentication part but once I start retrieving ring related data, I'm dumbfounded how much information is returned, no documentation of what that data actually does, not to mention, it can change from version to version. Is it that why Blade called it?

[Pete]

Here installed the Ring ecosystem in house #2 and managing it with a Ring to MQTT app and now it is an option with HA.

Ring MQTT with Video Streaming

Initially I was running it in Docker autonomously from HA.

I see the Ring devices in mcsMQTT just fine.

[jyves@videotron.ca]

dcorsus: I would be very interested by a working Ring PI, since it is for me the only device in my system that I can not control/view with HS4.

JYA

[dcorsus]

dcorsus: I would be very interested by a working Ring PI, since it is for me the only device in my system that I can not control/view with HS4.

JYA

Thanks. Are you a user of BLRing? If so, what, if any, is the problem?
From a quick test on events, I can predict this could easily be not very reliable. Attaching triggers to ring or motion events, with the only way to get events is by aggressively polling a remote cloud based server, well you can see how that can be a challenge to make that bullet proof.
What exactly would you want to do when you write "control/view"?

[jyves@videotron.ca]

Was, or tried to be...

I never had success, and if I remember well, I never could registred, there was always a messange ... waiting for something..., never had a notification or else.

I simply whant to be able to watch the DoorBell cam and view historic of notification on HS4, like a regular Cam.

JYA

[dcorsus]

Was, or tried to be...

I never had success, and if I remember well, I never could registred, there was always a messange ... waiting for something..., never had a notification or else.

I simply whant to be able to watch the DoorBell cam and view historic of notification on HS4, like a regular Cam.

JYA

Thanks for the feedback. I have a test running, poll every 2 seconds. So far the response time is on average 100msec, in 24h I had no failures but I did have a few responses that took 10 seconds to respond. So far better than I had expected.

[mikee123]

Here installed the Ring ecosystem in house #2 and managing it with a Ring to MQTT app and now it is an option with HA.

Ring MQTT with Video Streaming

Initially I was running it in Docker autonomously from HA.

I see the Ring devices in mcsMQTT just fine.

I do that too. Only disadvantage for me it stops working every couple of weeks or so, and you have to authorize again to generate a new key to put into MQTT / Ring

[avpman]

I have looked at it a couple times but I have been busy with other things
I did post the source code for it if anyone wants to look into it
What I would really like is for Ring to make their API public and then I think it would be easier to keep working
I don't think they plan to ever do this

Bob,
Would this help you bring the plugin back to life? https://github.com/dgreif/ring
Frankly, this is a shortfall on HS' part not to have Ring as part of their basic support set of plugins. I know there is the same feeling about Nest, which they are working on.