Nest Camera App Hyperlink

The refresh is all handled in your browser, so it’s not touching the SharpTools servers. :slight_smile:

It’s more about the servers that you are getting your images from. With Nest, you’re likely paying them for access already, so that may be fair use… it was more a warning for people who might be grabbing images or weather from a third party site. For weather, it’s highly unlikely that someone would need to refresh any faster than maybe once every 30 minutes or so… we wanted to at least warn people that they might be hammering someone’s server who is serving them a free image. And the more you hammer someone’s server, the more likely they are to lock it down! :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: Oh, and thanks for sharing your findings on the Nest Camera snapshots!

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Haha yea I’m paying a somewhat reasonable fee, so let 'er rip!

No problem, glad to help when it’s easy!
It is public though, so I’m sure web crawlers are all over it by now…
Gross…

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There’s live playback available when the stream is made public, right? It would be cool to use the JPG snapshot in a media tile and then use the new Open Hyperlink feature in the media tile to open the live stream URL directly when the tile is tapped. :sunglasses:

That’s a good idea!
On a less intelligent front, I was wondering, since I’m using the “cover” option for Media Scaling, when I click and it opens could it display the full image, not the cropped one?

But your idea sounds better honestly.

Edit1: ok so that works to put the URL in there under action → Open Hyperlink. But it’s not that nice modal display. Maybe not implemented here?

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Not yet, but as soon as I mentioned adding a Hyperlink I immediately thought the modal would be nice there. :stuck_out_tongue:

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@Keith_Croshaw the latest SharpTools.io platform release includes support for customizing the Link Action on Media Tile hyperlinks.

You can now choose between:

  • Open in New Window
  • Open in Same Window
  • Open in Modal

There’s a couple other cool features in the new release which you can find more about in the following post:

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Ok bringing this back up.

I had luck digging for web code like Keith_Croshaw talked about. Was then able to set it up as a media tile, used a high refresh rate (I pay Nest a lot, I figure their servers can handle it).

Then was able to hyperlink it off that to the camera feed when clicking on the tile.

Really Cool!

But…

(Let me start by saying I am a Mac guy, sorry)

When I get it all set up on my computer or tablets, it works perfect in Safari.

But as soon as I “add to home screen” and try and open that, the media frame is gone? I can still click it and bring me to the hyperlink.

I figure this is because Safari is storing the refresh link, and it is now gone once in the “home screen app”, but is there any work around?

Sorry if this makes little sense, my lingo is bad with all of this.

Is this using Add to Homescreen on the Mac or an iPad/iPhone?

Apple sandboxes the ‘Add to Homescreen’ browser quite a bit, so you may be right that something unique is going on there. Am I understanding correctly that you used the first approach @Keith_Croshaw mentioned with the public URL with a uuid parameter embedded in it?

That is correct about using uuid.

The problem is on both iPad and iPhone, and possibly even my Mac.

What I think is happening, if I don’t have the link open, in the browser I am running SharpTools, it kills the “image” on the media tile.

Now that I think about this, it makes perfect sense, I just created a direct link to that open tab.

Is there a work around?

Or am I wrong? I thought I had something cool going, but might be a mute point, I don’t won’t to keep my iPad mounted with full access to whomever might be around.

@Jason_Morris I’ve had an issue lately where I have to open the nest stream to get my tile updating. They must have changed something, or SharpTools changed something unknowingly. It’s no big deal but I agree they should not be skimping on the streaming for the price.

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Thanks for the insight, Keith.

Nest has been tweaking things quite a bit lately, so that’s not terribly surprising. :man_shrugging: They also deprecated the nexusapi*.dropcam.com URLs from your original post if I remember correctly.

Not saying any of this is malicious intent on their part… they just might not realize some people are using their cameras this way. :grinning:

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Guess my only issue now is the saving to home screen on the iPads.

Everything works fine, links and all, but just can’t get it to keep the “image”, I just get a blank tile.

Not sure if there is a work around on this.

Based on Keith’s commentary, have you tried using a Hyperlink to the Nest camera directly in one of your dashboards as a utility that way you can open the page and kick start the session as Keith mentioned and then navigate back to SharpTools to view things from there?

All of this may need to be done within the Add to Homescreen browser window as if it opens a separate Safari window then it won’t keep the session data.

It would be more of a utility than anything, so it could be tucked away on a linked dashboard or somewhere out of the way.

Well I have it set up with a very high refresh rate and is actually really cool!

Again, I would feel bad, but how much I pay Nest, until they allow access I don’t mind bogging down their servers…I know people who run live stream on separate monitors, so I imagine my way is way less of a strain.

My only last request (may already be possible) is for me to click on the tile and just have a zoomed up version. No different hyperlink or anything, just a pop up I can click to make large on my tablet, and click again to minimize?

I might be misunderstanding the request, but doesn’t the default action for the Media Tile do this? (eg. ‘Open Media Fullscreen’)

http://imgur.com/a/HTLxUAP

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I did try that, and just made everything go crazy in my home screen “app”.

I’m pretty happy with what I have, and will play around more. But I’m going to leave this at blaming Apples setup with Apples Guided Access setup.

I want this on so guests can’t mess with too much.

I accept the limitations this brings, and actually am happy with what I have so far.

I’ll keep saying it…but Josh you are awesome, as well as everyone on this forum…and of course I am loving SharpTools!

EDIT:

Well after a few hours of no response from full screen it is now working! No idea what the delay was from, but I am happy.

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I am going to plead “newby”, what steps did you take to get it working for the nest cam? Thanks!!!

Hi @Laurie_Dale, welcome to SharpTools community.

Here are the steps to achieve what @Jason_Morris and @Keith_Croshaw did with their Nest cam and SharpTools.

  1. Go to your Nest account → Settings → under “Video” section, enable “Camera Sharing”. In the code snippet, copy the src link, including the “autoplay=1” in the end.

  2. Open your browser and use “https:” plus the src link copied from step1 as the url.

    It should look like this.

    https://video.nest.com/embedded/live/XXX?autoplay=1

  3. Once the video page is loaded, press F12 to open the developer tool to find the link to get the camera static image.

    It should look like this.

    https://nexusapi-us1.camera.home.nest.com/get_image?uuid=XXX&width=540

    Please note that this url was deprecated by Nest as pointed out by @josh, so it may not work later.

  4. Head to SharpTools Manage Resource page, select “Media” at top, and create a new media using the link from step3 as the url, check “Enable Autorefresh” and set desired refresh rate. So the camera image will be displayed in the tile.
    image

  5. In your dashboard, add a media tile from the media created in step 4. Edit the medial tile to change the dimensions as you want, change Action(Tap) to “Open Hyperlink” and use the same url in step 2 as the hyperlink, change Link Action to “Open in Modal”. Save it.

Now you should see the camera image in the tile, and it will open the video stream page in the modal window and auto play when tapped.

Per Keith’s comment, you may need to “kickoff” the session to access the image by opening the camera’s link (https://video.nest.com/embedded/live/XXX?autoplay=1) directly first. So, as Josh suggested, you can add a Hyperlink tile to open this link in the dashboard, and navigate back to the dashboard to keep the session alive so the media tile can continuously to access the camera image.

Let me know if this helps. :slight_smile:

Unfortunately at f12, to get to the source code I get this error - “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 ()”

Do you mean you receive the 404 error when using the url in Step 2 in the browser? What is the url you used? (Please make sure to remove the “id” part from the url before posting it.) And did you complete step 1 to generate the publicly shared link?

https://video.nest.com/embedded/live/XXX?autoplay=1 → XXX is the id that you don’t want to share publicly.