Aqara
Aqara Camera E1
- Wi-Fi
Verified September 2026
A tidy £50-ish 2K pan/tilt that pairs locally with Home Assistant via HomeKit Controller — no cloud subscription needed. But there's no RTSP or ONVIF at all, night vision is infrared-only (no colour/starlight sensor), and the HomeKit stream in HA can lag noticeably behind the Aqara app's own view. The £20-25 Tapo C210 and £39 Tapo C225 both undercut it and add real RTSP/ONVIF for Frigate, with the C225 also adding colour night vision. Buy the E1 only if you're already deep in Aqara's ecosystem and want native HomeKit tie-in; otherwise a Tapo is the smarter, cheaper pick with better HA support.
In Home Assistant
| Control | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Live view | Camera | Streams the feed into HA over HomeKit; functional but known to lag noticeably behind the Aqara app's own live view. |
| Motion | Binary sensor | Generic motion sensor — fires for any detected motion, not specifically a person, since Aqara's person-detection result isn't relayed over HomeKit. |
| Identify | Button | Standard accessory identify action; flashes/beeps the camera to confirm you're controlling the right device. |
| Pan/tilt person tracking | Unsupported | Runs entirely on-device through Aqara's own firmware logic; HomeKit's camera profile has no pan/tilt characteristic, so this never becomes an HA entity — it's automatic and invisible to Home Assistant. |
Home Assistant's homekit_controller only inherits what Apple's HomeKit camera profile exposes — a live-view camera entity and a generic motion binary sensor — so the E1's on-device person detection and pan/tilt follow run entirely in firmware and never surface as a distinct HA entity; automations can trigger on motion but not specifically on a person. A documented GitHub issue covers a laggy/hanging stream that was closed as stale with no fix from the homekit_controller maintainers, so expect the HA camera card to lag noticeably behind the Aqara app's own live view. Setup only works over 2.4GHz — despite the Wi-Fi 6 radio the E1 won't join a 5GHz network, so band-steering needs disabling before pairing.
Specs
- wifi
- Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax, 2.4GHz only), Bluetooth 5.2 for setup
- power
- USB-C 5V/2A
- storage
- microSD, Class 4 or above, up to 512GB local recording; HomeKit Secure Video optional
- pan tilt
- 350° pan with person tracking (tilt angle not published by Aqara)
- placement
- indoor
- streaming
- local via HomeKit Controller pairing only — no RTSP/ONVIF
- dimensions
- 69 x 69 x 104mm
- resolution
- 2K 1296p
- night vision
- infrared night vision, monochrome only — no colour/starlight sensor; Aqara does not publish an IR range figure
- field of view
- 101° diagonal