Alerts
Alerts
The Alerts and Webservices tabs can do whatever you like - play an mp3 file, send you an email, send you an email with a framegrab attached, send you an SMS, send you an MMS (SMS with picture attached) etc. You can also tell iSpy to execute batch files - so you can interface the alerts with home automation - see movement outside and turn the lights on for example, see someone on your porch and play the sound of dogs barking. Anything is possible really!
You get a number of SMS credits with your subscription (as it costs us each time you send one). You can recharge your SMS credits through the recharge page on iSpyConnect.
The key thing to remember when testing alerts is the Distinct Alert Interval. iSpy is limited to one alert every 3 minutes (by default) - so if you are trying to trigger alerts to test and nothing is happening then you probably need to adjust this setting.
Mode: There are 5 types of alert mode:
- Movement Detected: This is triggered by the motion detector. You can click the "..." button next to this to specify a minimum interval of activity to trigger the alert.
- No Movement Detected: This is triggered when the motion detector stops detecting motion (useful for an office, or machinery etc). You can click the "..." button next to this to specify a minimum interval of inactivity to trigger the alert.
- Face Detected: This uses something called a HAAR Transform to find faces in images. It's currently experimental. You could use this to detect if someone sits down at your computer, rather than just walks past it. (see plugins)
- License plate Recognised: This uses Googles open source Tesseract engine along with some hefty image processing to detect and recognise numberplates (license plates). (see plugins)
Detailed guide to ALPR
- License plate Not Recognised: This alerts when a numberplate is not recognised (from a list of allowed plates)
- Overlay: This will overlay text provided by a text file and will alert if a keyword is detected in the text. External applications can write to the text file and the text will be updated automatically
Email Alerts with Framegrabs
iSpy can email you alerts with a framegrab as an attachment. iSpy can also email you a framegrab on an interval (say every 20 minutes). Note that iSpy will send a maximum of 10 emails in a half hour period per user.
Disconnection Alerts
This option will send you an email if the camera gets disconnected (unplugged)
SMS Alerts
Enter your mobile phone number here to receive an SMS alert. The number must start with your country code, followed by your number excluding the leading zero. For example if you live in Australia and your mobile number is 0416 123456 then you'd enter 61416141205. If you are away from home and you are getting too many SMS alerts you can turn them off for specific cameras through iSpyConnect.
MMS Alerts
MMS Alerts are picture messages that iSpy can send containing a framegrab from your camera. MMS alerts are delivered over a different network to SMS alerts and so may take longer to arrive. We recommend sticking to SMS or Email alerts if you want to receive notifications as soon as possible.