/ring-cam-greeter

Primary LanguageTypeScript

Ring Cam Greeter

A silly experiment built with ring-client-api where the goal was to play spooky sounds for kids trick or treating at my house. When the camera detects human motion, it plays a (scary) sound. 🎃

Setup

Refresh token

Follow the instructions here to generate a refresh token (I followed the second option with homebridge-ring). Create a file config/env/production.json which mirrors config/default.json and replace the refreshToken value with the output from the above steps.

Ring config

This tool operates on a single Ring location and a single camera at that location. You'll need to get the ids for both of them. Once you have the refresh token above, you can dump your Ring data to stdout by running:

NODE_ENV=production npm run ring-data

Find the id of the location you want to use (if you have more than one) and update the locationIds config value.

Find the id of the camera you want to use (within the previously selected location), and update the cameraId config value.

Sound config

There are two modes for playing sounds: the Apple say command, and a recorded audio file.

Apple say

This article has more info on the say command and how to manage the available voices.

  • Set the sound.mode config value to voice
  • Set the voice config value to something spooky (any of the "Novelty" voices is a good choice)
  • Set the message config value to something hilarious for the voice to say

Recordings

Plays an audio file directly through the camera (assuming it has a speaker, I think most of them do?).

  • Set the sound.mode config value to recording
  • Create a directory within the repo (default sounds), and then set the sound.recordingsDir config value.
  • Add an audio file to recordingsDir and then set recordingFile to the name of that file (default test.m4a).
  • By default, the recording will stop playing after 10 seconds. If you to play something longer, change sound.recordingMaxDuration to the desired value in milliseconds.

How to make recordings? I used the MacOS Voice Memos app to record myself saying something, the UI is a little unintuitive but you can then drag the recording directly into the folder where you want it to go.

Running it

Once you've completed all the steps as above, putting the configuration into config/env/production.json, you can run the app with:

NODE_ENV=production npm start