Can this API Silence/Unsilence motion events?

[BillyCroan]

I'm trying to make my ring doorbell suck less.

I live in a house with multiple adults and multiple dogs. None of us need our phones to beep any time one of us walks one of the dogs.

So I put a hall-effect sensor in the door frame on an RPI. And I was about to us that to DROP/ACCEPT the ring's traffic in the home firewall. But I came across this API and I thought maybe it would be cleaner to use an API to adjust notification settings in realtime than to block traffic.

My goal is that if the door has been opened, motion alerts stop. It should still serve the purpose of alerting me to visitors. But if someone inside goes outside first, then no alerts.

[dgreif]

Yes and no. The challenge with phone alerts is that those settings are stored per device. Another device (in this case the ring-client-api) cannot directly control the notifications on another device (your phone).

That said, this api can control the Location Mode settings. You might be able to get creative with the "Home"/"Away"/"Disarmed" settings so that they send the alerts in Home/Away mode, but not in Disarmed. Then you could use this API to temporarily enter Disarmed mode when the door opens. It's not a perfect solution, but might work better than your packet blocking at the network layer 😄

[tsightler]

Another alternative, if you don't want to use Modes, you can completely enable/disable motion detection while the door is open. In ring-mqtt I implemented this as a per-camera switch visible in Home Assistant to toggle motion detection on/off, same as the switch in the Ring app. This is probably a cleaner solution than blocking network traffic as it will also appear clearly in the Ring app that motion detection is enabled/disabled. You can see the code to do this in setMotionDetectionState() function in ring-mqtt.

[tsightler]

You don't need that function, I don't know why it is in there.

[drheck]

Hm. But how can i read the actual state from the camera?

[tsightler]

Look at the examples of other registered characteristics in the code. The data object always reflects the current state, you don't need to get it, the data.settings.motion_detection_enabled property already exist and has the state, you just need to return it

[drheck]

Okay. I got it... Thank you. Good night...

[drheck]

One further question: Is there a setting for disabeling the motion notifications only (like in the ring app)?
And where can i get the ring api documentation?