Only sending push notifications when some external status is true (e.g. Alarm is armed)

m_listed

Getting the hang of it
Jun 11, 2016
183
57
So I only want push notifications when the house alarm is armed. I've been thinking about this. The only real conditions on push notifications seem to be: profile, input source, and AI objects. The obvious candidate is profiles. But I use profiles for different motion settings based on the time. And I have a different schedule for each camera because each camera gets different amounts of shadows/light at different times of the day that determine its motion sensitivity profile.

Is there another way to add an extra "bit" of information to enable/disable push notifications, other than profiles? Setting an "Alarm Profile" would be a brute force method in my situation, since I'm setting profiles with a per-camera precision. I saw Shield and DIO and stuff like that that I'm not sure would help in this situation. Profiles have "Temp time" and "Until triggered" etc. options that could somehow be bent to my purposes, but I'm not sure how.

Anyone have experience with this kind of thing?
 
Now that I consider all functionality as a whole, I think that the "Shield" functionality is the closest to this use case: either your system is "armed" or "disarmed", the natural binary choice inherent in alarm systems too. The Shield system lets you disable different parts when the system is disarmed, which should work, except... The shortcoming here is that the Shield functionality only supports disabling all Alerts, not just push notifications.

As it's evolved, BI's "Alerts" functionality has shifted to include all sorts of things that aren't usually considered alerts, like scripts, etc. that I have and don't want disabled when Alerts are disabled.

Right now, my solution to the above situation is to stop using separate schedules per-camera and settle on a single "good-enough" global schedule for all cameras. Then I can define another "alarm armed" schedule that is exactly the same as the default one, except using separate "high alert" profiles instead. Then I can go into each camera and define the new "high alert" profiles to be exact copies of the normal profiles, except with push notifications enabled in the Alerts tab. This is annoying because profiles can only clone Profile #1 and not others, so I will have to manually copy any changes between the other normal–high alert profile pairs. But not too bad, I guess.