In Part 1, we looked at building a simple input circuit to electrically isolate and protect our Raspberry Pi from damage when connecting it to our doorbell switch. Next, we’ll look at displaying a camera overlay directly in Kodi / XBMC and triggering the display from a Python script.

IP cameras have become really cheap and easy to come by, giving us many options to integrate video into our home automation systems. The front door is a great place to install a camera!

The Digital Lifestyle has a very good write up on how to install and configure an add-on to display the camera overlay (especially if you have more than one camera) directly in Kodi itself.

We can then use some Python code to trigger the add-on using Kodi’s API.

Prerequisites: In Kodi, make sure “Allow control of Kodi via HTTP” is set to ON in Settings -> Services -> Webserver.

I wrote a small XBMC / Kodi client to make it easier to make calls to the API. Here is the method for triggering an add-on:

    def execute_addon(self, addon_id):
        payload = self._get_payload("Addons.ExecuteAddon",
{'addonid': addon_id})
        self._do_post_request(payload)

And here is the code for instantiating the client and executing the add-on:

xbmc_client = xbmc.XbmcClient(host, port)
xbmc_client.execute_addon("script.frontdoorcam")

On line 1, we instantiate the XBMC client by specifying the host and port. The port is configured in Kodi’s Settings -> Services -> Webserver -> Port.

The only parameter we are passing to the execute_addon method is the ID of the add-on we wish to run. Set it to the add-on ID that you specified in the addon.xml file.

That’s it. Next, we’ll look at how to build a text to speech server using Tornado.