Q: I installed my

MQTT
camera
according to your guide in ioBroker
. But now I am unable to access my cameras web interface. The camera no longer accepts my login.

Mike Polinowski
INSTAR MQTT
Firmware Update
Full HD Series
INSTAR Deutschland GmbH
INSTAR MQTT

Make your camera the heart of your smart home

INSTAR MQTT

Using the MQTT interface of your INSTAR Full HD cameras you can connect them to an existing smarthome system (Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Node-RED, Athom Homey, Homematic, ioBroker, Loxone, homee) can be added. Or even make it the main broker for your MQTT sensors. MQTT allows you to automate ALL functions of your camera and link them to other services in your smarthome.

Mike Polinowski
IFTTT Applets
Firmware Update
Full HD Series
INSTAR Cloud
INSTAR Deutschland GmbH
INSTAR IFTTT Applets

Control your camera via the IFTTT online service

INSTAR IFTTT

On the IFTTT platform, we provided a service called INSTAR. The INSTAR applets provide you with the ability to control some settings of your INSTAR camera or INSTAR Cloud with IFTTT. You can connect INSTAR with triggers for location (Geo Location) and date & time, send notifications and much more. For example, you can connect INSTAR applets to the IFTTT location service and automatically disable the alarm when you arrive home. You can also use the INSTAR applets to create your own automation and connect them to other third-party applets.

A: Make sure that you deactivate the option to update states when a device is connecting in the MQTT adapter configuration:

INSTAR MQTT Explorer for ioBroker

This function will update your camera configuration with empty strings when ioBroker did not yet receive the actual state from your camera. This might overwrite parts of your configuration with the string ${val}. For example your username or your password might end up being substituted.

Try to login with ${val} as your password or username and see if you can access your camera. When you are back on the webUI use the

Soft Reset
that allows you to return your camera to it's factory default but keep your network settings.

Alternatively, you can use a tool like

the MQTT Explorer or MQTT.fx
to reset all affected topics.

Start by searching for topics that are set to a incorrect value - But note: when you connect to the MQTT server of your camera, you will see all status topics, except user logins! All logins are intentionally hidden. But you can find the corresponding command topics in our

MQTT documentation
- e.g. the camera admin login is set by system/user/admin/name and system/user/admin/password.

Once you found a problematic topic use the command topic to update it to the correct value:

INSTAR MQTT Explorer for ioBroker

Shortly after updating the command topic, the status topic should update as well:

INSTAR MQTT Explorer for ioBroker

If the object tree in ioBroker does not update, try to refresh the view manually. Or restart the MQTT Adapter or ioBroker itself:

INSTAR MQTT Explorer for ioBroker

In this example we updated the MQTT topic to enable the first alarm detection area - we can check the camera webUI to verify that the area was switched on:

INSTAR MQTT Explorer for ioBroker

But be careful when editing the values directly inside the ioBroker Object Tree! The camera only retains the values for Status Topics. If you restart the MQTT Adpater or ioBroker the Object Tree will loose all values it had for Command Topics. This does not matter during regular operations. But when you are manually updating those values, make sure that you do not click into such field and leave this field again without typing in a correct value:

INSTAR MQTT Explorer for ioBroker

Again, this would delete your camera settings...