Blink

The blink integration lets you view camera images and motion events from Blink camera and security systems.

Setup

You will need your Blink login information (username, which is usually your email address, and password) to use this module.

Configuration

The preferred method for setting this up is by using the configuration flow. Go to the integrations page in your configuration and click on new integration -> Blink. When you are prompted for your pin, there are (currently) two possibilities:

1. You are sent an email asking for you to allow Home Assistant to access Blink. In this case, leave the pin field blank and hit Submit.

2. You are sent an email or SMS containing a 2FA pin. In this case, please enter the pin and hit Submit.

Your integration will then set up. Given that setup is asynchronous, you may see your sensors before they have finished extracting data from the Blink servers. After a few minutes (at most) this information should populate.

Once Home Assistant starts and you authenticate access, the blink integration will create the following platforms (note: Blink Mini cameras do not currently support any of the sensors, nor the battery status binary sensor):

• An alarm_control_panel to arm/disarm the whole blink system (note, alarm_arm_home is not implemented and will not actually do anything, despite it being an option in the GUI).
• A camera for each camera linked to your Blink sync module.
• A sensor per camera for temperature and Wi-Fi strength.
• A binary_sensor motion detection, camera armed status, and battery status.

Since the cameras are battery operated, setting the scan_interval must be done with care so as to not drain the battery too quickly, or hammer Blink’s servers with too many API requests. The cameras can be manually updated via the trigger_camera service which will ignore the throttling caused by scan_interval. As a note, all of the camera-specific sensors are only polled when a new image is requested from the camera. This means that relying on any of these sensors to provide timely and accurate data is not recommended.

Please note that each camera reports two different states: one as sensor.blink_<camera_name>_status and the other as binary_sensor.blink_<camera_name>_motion_enabled. The motion_enabled property reports if the camera is ready to detect motion regardless if the system is actually armed.

Services

Any sequential calls to services relating to blink should have a minimum of a 5 second delay in between them to prevent the calls from being throttled and ignored.

blink.blink_update

Force a refresh of the Blink system.

blink.trigger_camera

Trigger a camera to take a new still image.

blink.save_video

Save the last recorded video of a camera to a local file. Note that in most cases, Home Assistant will need to know that the directory is writable via the allowlist_external_dirs in your configuration.yaml file (see example below).

homeassistant:
  allowlist_external_dirs:
    - '/tmp'
    - '/path/to/whitelist'

blink.send_pin

Send a new pin to blink. Since Blink’s 2FA implementation is new and changing, this is to allow the integration to continue to work with user intervention. The intent is to handle all of this behind the scenes, but until the login implementation is settled this was added. To use it, you simply call the service with the pin you receive from Blink as the payload (for a simple “Allow this Device” email, you may keep the pin value empty).

Other Services

In addition to the services mentioned above, there are generic camera and alarm_control_panel services available for use as well. The camera.enable_motion_detection and camera.disable_motion_detection services allow for individual cameras to be enabled and disabled, respectively, within the Blink system. The alarm_control_panel.alarm_arm_away and alarm_control_panel.alarm_disarm services allow for the whole system to be armed and disarmed, respectively. Blink Mini cameras linked to an existing sync module cannot be armed/disarmed individually via Home Assistant.

Examples

The following are some examples showing how to correctly make service calls using Blink:

Snap Picture and Save Locally

This example script shows how to take a picture with your camera, named My Camera in your Blink app (this is not necessarily the friendly name in Home Assistant). After snapping a picture, the image will then be saved to a local directory called /tmp/my_image.jpg. Note that this example makes use of services found in the camera integration

alias: "Blink Snap Picture"
sequence:
  - service: blink.trigger_camera
    target:
      entity_id: camera.blink_my_camera
  - delay: 00:00:05
  - service: blink.blink_update
  - service: camera.snapshot
    target:
      entity_id: camera.blink_my_camera
    data:
      filename: /tmp/my_image.jpg

Arm Blink When Away

This example automation will arm your blink sync module to detect motion on any of your blink cameras that have motion detection enabled. By default, Blink enables motion detection on all cameras so, unless you’ve changed anything in your app, you’re all set. If you want to manually enable motion detection for individual cameras, you can utilize the appropriate camera service but please note that motion will only be captured if the sync module is armed.

Here, this example assumes your blink module is named My Sync Module and that you have device trackers set up for presence detection.

- id: arm_blink_when_away
  alias: "Arm Blink When Away"
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: all
    to: "not_home"
  action:
    service: alarm_control_panel.alarm_arm_away
    target:
      entity_id: alarm_control_panel.blink_my_sync_module

Disarm Blink When Home

Similar to the previous example, this automation will disarm blink when arriving home.

- id: disarm_blink_when_home
  alias: "Disarm Blink When Home"
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: all
    to: "home"
  action:
    service: alarm_control_panel.alarm_disarm
    target:
      entity_id: alarm_control_panel.blink_my_sync_module

Save Most Recent Video Locally When Motion Detected

When motion is detected, you can use the Blink Home Assistant integration to save the last recorded video locally, rather than relying on Blink’s servers to save your data.

The following example assumes your camera’s name (in the Blink app) is My Camera and your sync module name is My Sync Module. The file will be saved to /tmp/videos/blink_video_{YYYMMDD_HHmmSS}.mp4 where {YYYYMMDD_HHmmSS} will be a timestamp create via the use of templating.

- id: save_blink_video_on_motion
  alias: "Save Blink Video on Motion"
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.blink_my_camera_motion_detected
    to: "on"
  action:
    service: blink.save_video
    data:
      name: "My Camera"
      filename: "/tmp/videos/blink_video_{{ now().strftime('%Y%m%d_%H%M%S') }}.mp4"

Save All Recent Clips Locally on a Schedule

A list of all the recent video clips is updated at each refresh of the Blink system. The video clips are available in a download list (per camera) for up to an hour, and they can be downloaded at any time before the one-hour expiration time. After a clip is downloaded it is removed from the list.

The following example demonstrates saving recent clips every three minutes. It assumes your camera’s name (in the Blink app) is My Camera. The file will be saved to /tmp/videos/YYYYMMDD_HHmmSS_MyCamera.mp4. The file name of the downloaded video file is not configurable.

- id: save_recent_clips_from_my_camera
  alias: "Save Recent Clips from My Camera"
  trigger:
    - platform: time_pattern
      minutes: /3
  action:
    - service: blink.save_recent_clips
      data:
        name: My Camera
        file_path: /tmp/videos