Nest Camera App Hyperlink

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.

I did, I did it 3 times. Weird, I did it again from a different wifi than the camera and it worked! I will test again, as I have other Nest cams.

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@Keith_Croshaw @Jason_Morris @Laurie_Dale
We’ve added experimental support for Nest Cam public URLs to media tiles in the latest SharpTools.io beta. I’ve added each of you to the beta testers group, so you should have access to the following topic:

https://community.sharptools.io/t/nest-cam-in-media-tiles/1385?u=josh (beta only)

If you could give it a try and let us know how it works for you, we would really appreciate it!

The manual approach noted above where you sift through the HTML to find secret URLs provides more control over how things work (eg. media tile click action), but is quite an intimidating and complex process for most users. This new approach should make it much easier for the average user to display their Nest Cam streams in their dashboards. :smiley:

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Can I be added to the beta tester group please?

Sure thing. By the way, experimental Nest Camera support is available in production now. I guess I forgot to update this thread - my apologies!

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Works perfectly so far! Thank you!

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Hey Josh, Very happy to be able to access my Nest Cam via Sharptools… it’s really a nice addition to my Dashboards!! Any update on being able to access Nest Thermostats and Smoke Detectors via a Shaptools tile? I know Google was working on releasing a new API after they stopped Works With Nest…

Please keep us posted and thanks in advance…

Glad to hear you’re enjoying things!

If you connect your Thermostats or Smoke Detectors into Hubitat or SmartThings using a community integration, you can authorize them in SharpTools.

From what I understand, these community integrations rely on the Nest API which would have required you register a Nest account before August 31 2019 and not have migrated to a Google account.

We’ll have to wait and see what they release under new APIs. As of this point, they’re moving everything into Google Assistant which is a pretty closed ecosystem. Easy to get things in, but no APIs to get things back out.

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I’m setting this up for my dashboard and have a question about the Public access set up within the Nest account. Are you required to leave this as “public” always or is this used just to obtain the URL needed? I’m not sure I would want my cameras to remain “public” viewable. Any way to use the setting to share with a password if this is required to remain in some sort of sharable state?

If there is a beta group or a more current thread on this topic, please point me to the link.

Thanks to all!

Hi @Jim_Slebodnik, welcome to the community. Unfortunately, it is currently the only way to allow the dashboard to access the Nest cam’s streaming video. I’ve seen users streaming their doorbells and outdoor facing cameras in the dashboards, and I agree I would be cautious for the indoor cameras.

Thank you for the follow-up on my question. I appreciate the quick reply.

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