The more I use it, the more I am finding the limitations... A lot of which are actually on the BI side. I would like to be able to pick which alerts use BI, as well as telling NOT to send over the unprocessed alerts. It would also be able to adjust the "sensitivity" or confidence levels. I am getting a number of false alarms so it would be nice to tune it to less sensitive at night when it wakes me up, and more sensitive during the day. This combined with sending over multiple snap shots would be gone.
Use Case:
All alerts go to email in the cloud in case the local storage is stolen (I am going to experiment with on reset options for this until more flexibility is added)
App notification of all Alerts during the day
Text Alert for"flagged" / analyzed alerts 24x7
local audio for "flagged" /analyzed alerts 24x7
Schedules within BI are perfect for this use case.
I have 2 main schedules
[HOME] and
[AWAY]
Geofencing switches between home and away schedules. Basically AWAY sends mobile IOS alerts and HOME doesn't.
Then within each Schedule I have 2 profiles
DAY and NIGHT
Where a few of the features are different including sensitivity.
ie: During the day, scene changes don't set an alarm, where at night you don't want this or you miss torches, car headlights changing the entire scene.
My night profiles also have Night checked and lower sensitivity levels.
If you don't record always and just on motion (which isn't a good idea, but I acknowledge a lot of people do), then try, using zones.
Zone A, select everything
Zone B, select a subset to be alerted on
Then configure your alerts to alert on Zone B only. Any movement though will still trigger a recording in Zone A, just not an Alert and not Sentry.
In my conclusion Sentry is really just a daily summary, misses too many real alerts to be useful, but certainly does as claimed by reducing false alerts.
I have setup second camera feeds, that create a continuous timelapse video (of just motion events). Doesn't use any noticeable additional processing as I have these feeds triggered off the primary feeds, they don't do their own motion detection. These go into a different folder and provide a good daily animated summary of all alerts.
Many ways to do what you want, you can even have additional camera feeds just for sentry. Could even be a sub-Chanel to use lower CPU if that is of concern.
I have my sub-channels going into AWS IoT then Kinesis. Using a low frame rate, it doesn't consume much storage.
Using a very basic Dynamo DB database to store faces. This is all just off the shelf using the quickstart.
I don't have the time or the application knowledge to do anything overly useful.
