Hi, I’m trying to get a G5 camera to be off at a certain time and come on in the evening (even when I’m home).
When setting up timed automations all that’s shows as an accessory is a tile showing as system with an alarm symbol, no actual camera.
I set the cameras up with HomeKit and not matter and the cameras work fine in the Apple Home app, they’re just not selectable in automations.
Any help appreciated.
Hi there,
This is a known limitation of how Apple Home handles cameras, but here is a quick breakdown of what is going on under the hood.
When you try to use the camera in the automations tab, it won’t show up as a standard camera tile. Instead, it is exposed as three separate accessories: a security system alarm, a spotlight, and a motion sensor. While you can fully control the security system and the spotlight via your automations, you cannot directly control the camera’s actual power or recording state here. The motion sensor can be used as a trigger, while the video feed itself is evaluated locally by your Apple Home Hub.
If you open the camera’s settings directly in the Apple Home app, you will find the “Recording Options”. This feature allows you to change the camera’s behavior based on whether people are home or away, but unfortunately, Apple does not support any time-based scheduling here.
As a workaround, since the camera itself functions as an Aqara hub, you can easily configure a time-based schedule directly within the Aqara Home app to turn it on and off at specific times of the day. Alternatively, you can create scenes within the Aqara Home app and synchronize them to Apple Home. Since these synced scenes can be selected inside Apple Home automations, you can use them to control the camera’s power state directly from there as well. Since Apple Home completely lacks native scheduling for cameras, using the camera’s native app or its scene integration is the best way to bypass this limitation.
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