Everstra Hub Free
Everything your Axis camera knows, in Home Assistant. Hub runs on the camera and publishes the state of the Everstra modules and the camera itself to your own MQTT broker — and takes commands back. Encrypted with TLS, across sites through Tailscale. Nothing phones home — no telemetry, no analytics, no account.
Now Axis-signed
Everstra Hub is released as a digitally signed ACAP application, countersigned by Axis Communications, like every other Everstra module. The camera verifies the signature against Axis’s own trust chain — from the device’s firmware up to the application — before the app runs, and it installs even on cameras configured to reject unsigned apps. That makes it ready for use in professional and corporate camera networks.
What it does
Home Assistant’s built-in Axis integration brings in the camera’s video and a set of its events. Hub goes much further: it turns the camera into a device in Home Assistant with the values you actually want to watch — and lets you act on them.
- Everstra module status — which of Everstra Live, Overlay and Capture are installed and running, their version and licence state, how many of Live’s streams are on air, and what Capture’s jobs are doing
- Camera metrics — temperature sensors, CPU load and memory, uptime, fan and heater, storage and recording state, I/O ports, tampering and day/night events, and the stream settings of each view area such as resolution, frame rate and target bitrate. What the camera offers is discovered on the camera itself, so every model shows what it really has
- Granular choice — pick value by value what is published to Home Assistant. Nothing is sent that you have not selected, and a value you switch off is removed from Home Assistant again
- Control back into the camera — start and stop Live streams and switch Capture jobs on or off from Home Assistant, and set chosen image and video settings of the camera. Every writable value is off until you enable it one by one, and only from a fixed list — nothing that deletes, and nothing outside image and video settings
- Home Assistant discovery — sensors, switches, numbers and selections appear on their own, grouped under one device per camera
- Across sites through Tailscale — the camera reaches a broker in another building or another town through the Tailscale app’s proxy, without opening a port
- TLS-encrypted — MQTT over TLS with certificate verification; upload the broker’s own certificate for a self-signed Mosquitto instead of switching verification off
- Your broker, nobody else’s — Hub talks only to the broker you enter. Until you do, nothing leaves the camera
- Backup & Restore — export connection, certificate and your selection as one JSON file and import it on another camera; the broker password is never part of the export
- Privacy manager: every connection Hub opens, at a glance — exportable, always visible
In practice: a sensor fires, the camera reacts
Hub does not decide anything for you. It hands Home Assistant the building blocks — sensors from the camera and switches back into it — and you build the automation in Home Assistant. The logic is yours. Four examples, each possible with Hub 0.1 as it is:
Motion outside → start recording
A motion, radar or PIR sensor in Home Assistant triggers. Through Hub, the automation switches on a job you prepared in Everstra Capture — for example a timelapse — or starts a Live stream. After a few quiet minutes the same automation switches it off again.
Uses: Capture job on/off, Live stream start/stop
One button, other sites → cameras start together
A physical push button in Home Assistant in Hamburg starts a Live stream or switches on a Capture job on a camera in Munich. Put several cameras in one automation and the same press starts them all at once — Munich, Paris and New York. Every camera reaches the broker in Hamburg through Tailscale, and each one acts only on the commands addressed to it.
Uses: Live stream start, Capture job on, Tailscale (across sites)
Camera runs hot → cool it or warn
Hub publishes the camera’s temperature sensors. When one crosses your limit, Home Assistant switches on a fan it controls — say a smart plug in the housing — or sends you a notification.
Uses: temperature sensors from the camera
Night schedule → different image settings
A time trigger in Home Assistant changes the camera’s image settings for the night — exposure, or the IR cut filter for day/night — and sets them back in the morning. This works for every setting the camera marks as writable and you have enabled for writing in Hub.
Uses: writable image settings
There is no single-snapshot command in Hub 0.1: “recording” here means switching on a Capture job, which then captures by its own settings.
Set it up
The setup guide walks through every step: the Mosquitto add-on in Home Assistant, a self-signed certificate, loading it into Hub, entering the broker, and the optional Tailscale connection for remote sites.
The Tailscale ACAP is a third-party project, not part of Everstra and not maintained by it. Hub only needs it to reach a broker at another site.
Requirements
- Axis camera with ACAP support. AXIS OS 11.11 (LTS 2024) or later
- Architecture: aarch64 (most current models) or armv7hf — see the list of supported models
- An MQTT broker you run — for example the Mosquitto add-on in Home Assistant
- Optional: the Tailscale ACAP on the camera, to reach a broker at another site
- A license key — issued free of charge, bound to camera hardware
Screenshots
What’s possible
Ideas, not a roadmap. The scenarios below are possible future directions that Hub’s design leaves room for. None of them is part of Hub today, and none is promised or scheduled.
- Fleet monitor — one view over many cameras and sites: which modules run where, which camera runs hot, which one has not reported
- Webhooks — send selected state changes to any HTTP endpoint, not only to an MQTT broker
- Prometheus / Grafana — camera metrics as a scrape target for long-term graphs and alerting
- Scenes and automations — start a stream, switch a capture job or change an image setting as part of a Home Assistant scene
- Watchdog and reboot — notice a module or camera that stopped responding and restart it deliberately
- Time- and event-driven actions — act on a schedule or on a camera event, on the camera itself
- PTZ and optics control — zoom, focus and preset positions from Home Assistant, where the camera supports them
- PTZ reaction — the next step after the example above: a sensor in Home Assistant fires and the camera turns to a preset position before recording starts. An idea for later — Hub 0.1 cannot move the camera