Email notifications for flat battery now going out.

If you are using one of our thermal cameras, then you will have probably noticed that we have rolled out the functionality to send an email when we think your battery is flat. We had said we were testing this back in May

This useful functionality helps you with your battery management. The email alert  saves you from having to remember when you last charged or noticing that you don't have any videos (I find it difficult noticing when something isn't there).

The way this works at the moment is the camera sends an event to the Cacophony sever at the end of each night saying that it is going into sleep mode. If the sever doesn't receive this event then it sends out the email. The emails go to the group admins. If you have access to multiple cameras then you will just get one email with a list of all the cameras that may have flat batteries. It will only send you an email once, until it sees the camera come back on again. This way you don't receive an email every day if the camera is off for an extended period.

At the moment, the algorithm doesn't work if you have set up your camera to record 24/7. In this mode the camera never sends an event saying it is going to sleep. We are working on a tweak to the algorithm to fix this.

If you want to check before going out to your camera then you can go to the devices page for your group,, where it shows a red broken heart beside any devices that we haven't heard from in the past 24 hours.

Just because the Cacophony server hasn't heard from your camera doesn't mean that it has a flat battery. It may not have a network connection.

One situation where this doesn't work properly is when you have a camera that has no connection, but gets a connection briefly (either because it is on the edge of connectivity, or it get's a connection when you are downloading videos using the Sidekick app). In this case the server may get a message that the camera is online, and then 24 hours later when the server has not heard from the camera it sends out an email erroneously. We are also looking at how to stop these emails. For now our customers have learnt to not trust emails about those cameras.