Feature Tweak Request: allow user to selectively toggle various types of notifications/alerts

[deviantollam]

Presently (at least as of 0.2.0-alpha4) there doesn't appear to be any simple way for a user to toggle specific monitoring features on or off. It seems to me that Haven will alert on the following...

1. Camera (we've talked about how the sensitivity settings are hard to manage)

2. Sound (this is easier for the user to configure, but not possible to turn "off" completely... unless you maybe select a totally ridiculously high threshold perhaps?)

3. Movement (again... this is relatively easy for the user to configure, but not possible to turn "off" completely... unless you maybe select a totally ridiculously high threshold)

4. Ambient Light (i see alerts from this sensor, but no configurable settings at all that the user can see, i think?)

There are two or three other types of monitoring/status alerts that i've advocated for...

5. AC Power vs Battery Power (i'd love to have Haven shoot a message to the user saying "device no longer charging via external power, battery percentage now X%" and also "device now charging via external power, battery percentage now X%")

6. Monitoring Active (this would be a really useful option, i think. If you have configured a "delay" setting, you press "Start" and leave the room... it'd be very cool if Haven sent you a notification message a minute later (or after whatever you delay window is) saying "Haven monitoring active" and with an attachment of a still image showing the camera's field of view, so you can know if the phone was positioned the way you wanted to leave it)

Overall, I'd love it if a simple toggle switch existed for all of those sensor settings. So the user could manually turn on or off monitoring (and, therefore notification) of any individual sensor. In a super noisy environment, maybe someone doesn't want the microphone to ever detect anything or clutter up the logs, etc... so they just turn that off. Same could go for movement sensor... maybe the Haven device is being left running in a moving box. Heck, maybe you're monitoring if someone is opening your suitcase during transit. So you disable "movement" and "camera" but leave "sound" and "ambient light" sensors active.

Just a thought. I love granular control... but novice users could, of course, have difficulty with that kind of thing.

[CameraCornet]

I've been experimenting with adding features to the code.... my primary thought is this: the entire device is being dedicated as a server. The camera motion detection uses a high amount of resources, etc. And the basic usage of the app is when no human is around the phone, the very essence of a dedicated server.

With that in mind, I have always found the ideal thing to do is decouple the action from the motion-detection app. In other words, run two apps on the phone. One is responsible for what Haven is executing constantly today, sensors doing data analysis. The second app deals with notifications when a sensor event is detected.

A primary motivation for this is pretty simple: what if you have 10 Android devices running Haven... you may want to feed all those notifications into one place to make intelligent decisions about aggregating events.... to make intelligent decisions on how to deal with a swarm of notifications from multiple devices. What if someone enters a hotel room and turns on the lights, triggering all 10 Haven devices via camera sensor?

Also consider that people may actually want to interface with proprietary software for the purposes of notification. So, having two apps, which communicate through interprocess communications, allows more flexible front-end software to interface with the core Haven server app.

"I love granular control... but novice users could, of course, have difficulty with that kind of thing." - an API for configuring would allow multiple UI front-ends to be developed for exposing novice/advance levels of setting sophisticated features. Such as an API to set a day of week / time of day schedule of when to monitor. The "server" Haven app would have to establish the protocol for setting schedule via API, but all the user-interface could be delegated to outside web apps. Here again, one may be managing 10 different Android Haven cameras via one master control app.

Excuse this message for not being the most fleshed out, hopefully it's useful to the topic.