HomeHelper lost actions

FenC

I have been using SecuritySpy for several years, and I paired it with HomeHelper some time ago to manage arming and disarming cameras based on the presence of my wife or me.

Today it is showing the triggers, but has lost all the actions associated with them. I believe this happened once before and I found something on-line about it. Either I did something I don't remember to fix it, or it came right by itself.

I haven't had a lot of time to troubleshoot, but I didn't find anything about the issue through Google and and it hasn't come right by itself after a number of reboots and taking the latest security update for Sequoia. Needless to say I don't remember what I did last time

I am running the latest update 6.17 of SecuritySpy on an M1 Mac mini with 8GB RAM. I have updated Sequoia to 15.7.3 earlier today (after HomeHelper lost the actions). The mini is dedicated to running SecuritySpy, HomeHelper and Sync Folders Pro to offload recordings to my NAS and I have 22 cameras active on a 32 camera license.

I don't want to have to recreate all the actions for my triggers because I know I didn't have to do that previously, and I haven't edited anything in HomeHelper for fear it will overwrite any possibility to recover the previous configuration. I'm hoping someone else has seen the issue and has a better memory than I do and knows how to recover the actions.

Sorry if this isn't the right category to post in - there isn't a HomeHelper one and Home Automation didn't look right when I checked the other content there.

Ben

I'm not immediately sure what could have caused this - it's not a known issue, and it's also strange that only actions are affected - all settings are stored together, so if there were any loss or corruption of this file, they should all be affected.

Do you have a Time Machine backup? If so, do this:

• Hold the alt/option key while clicking the Go menu in the Finder; select Library
• Within that Library folder, navigate down into this path: Containers/HomeHelper/Data/Library/Preferences
• Here you should find a file called "com.bensoftware.HomeHelper.plist" - this holds all of HomeHelper's settings - back it up somewhere (e.g. copy it to your Desktop)
• Enter Time Machine, and look for a saved version of this file from before the data loss, and restore it.

FenC

Hi Ben, thanks for coming back to me.

First off an apology as I set Home Helper up some years ago and I had forgotten how it works. I didn't have any actions as my use case is to solely enable and disable recording and alerting of my cameras based on triggers.

I do still have an issue however; when I create a trigger I can name it (though the box to enter the name doesn't show a cursor, and if I select the text in it such that typing over-writes it there is no visual indicator that it is selected), and I can select the trigger from my HomeKit devices, but once I hit save I can't go back to edit it. If I click on a trigger that is already configured it opens as if I hit the plus symbol to create a new trigger, and if I add the same config it creates a duplicate when I save it.

My triggers are all virtual switches that I create outside of HomeKit and present via a bridge interface. I find HomeKit automations can just stop working for no reason and need to be recreated, and I want to be able to manage my home from Android and Windows devices as well as Apple ones, so I use HomeKit as just a UI as much as I can. I hadn't joined the two things together, but I think I must have lost them when I switched from Hubitat's HomeKit interface to Home Assistant's. I didn't notice they were not working until sometime after I did that, but it makes too much sense that that would have broken them that it has to be the case.

I tried removing HomeHelper, including the plist file you pointed me to above, rebooting and reinstalling, but the issue remained.

I set all my triggers back up using Helper toggles from Home Assistant that are presented to HomeKit and HomeHelper is working again, but as above I can't edit them. Setting it back up wasn't as bad as job as I had feared because the heavy lifting is done by the schedule presets that are held in SecuritySpy, and those were fine.

So I am all working again, but unless I am misremembering that I should be able to open a trigger in HomeHelper and edit it there is still a strange issue.

Ben

We have just released an update of HomeHelper - version 1.2 available from the App Store. This has many improvements including fixing the user interface issues that you refer to. It also now has direct support for Home Assistant, so to use your HA devices you won't need any kind of bridge to HomeKit - just enter the HA details into HomeHelper into its new Settings window, and it will have full direct access to all HA devices (documentation is coming soon with the next update of SecuritySpy, but if anything is not obvious please let me know).

FenC

Hi Ben,

That's twice in less than a week I have been blown away by you adding something that is unbelievably useful to me that I wasn't expecting - the first being SecuritySpy for Android (my notifications aren't working yet, but I haven't spent any time looking into why, and even without them it's still way better than TinyCam Pro was), and now direct Home Assistant integration with HomeHelper!

I just downloaded HomeHelper 1.2 and as you say the UI issues are fixed. I have connected it to Home Assistant and see its devices available as triggers. I still want to present the HA helper to HomeKit so my wife can disarm cameras easily from her Apple devices when she wants to, but given how unreliable HomeKit has proven over the years I have used it I am determined to remove it from being a point of failure in my home automations as much as I can, and every little helps. I'm still new to HA and only set up presence detection this weekend (based on phones being connected to WiFi), so I'm still evaluating it, but if it proves reliable with this unexpected feature I think I will be at the point where only our Schlage Encode Plus locks need to be natively connected to HomeKit (otherwise HomeKey doesn't work).

Ben

Great to hear that the Home Assistant integration is useful for you!

Assuming your wife is connecting with an iOS device using our app, this will give here control over recording/schedules, like this:

• From the live full-screen view, tap one of the mode icons at the bottom (C: Continuous Capture, M: Motion Capture, A: Actions). A menu will pop up, giving the choice of a schedule change or temporary override.
• Create some Schedule Presets - these define a set of schedules to apply to a set of cameras. A common use case is a "Home" and "Away" schedule. These can then be invoked from the Schedule Setter in the iOS app.

Let me know if you can't work out Android notifications. The main thing to check here is that Actions mode for the camera(s) in question is armed on a suitable schedule like "Armed 24/7". iOS and Android notifications are classed as Actions, so this mode needs to be armed for notifications to be sent.