release/2020-11-18

[CamectArup]

release/2020-11-18: 

New features: 

    1. Seasonal fun: Santa Claus detection, as seen above. It will be gone after a few weeks. We'd love to see any interesting Santa captures you get :-). 

    2. Support for Coral USB AI accelerator. (See below.) 

    3. Local audio announcements of alerts (See below.) 

    4. Detection of new objects within an active alert -- i.e. if an object is detected and is moving (so the alert hasn't ended) and a new object shows up, we now send another alert for the new object. 

    5. Partial Wyze Cam v3 support. It should now work at SD (640x360) resolution. We'll look into adding 1080p eventually.

     6. A first pass at Alexa support for Echo Show devices. We'll post instruction separately for it. 

 Optimization/Bugs/Small changes: 

     - Algorithm tweaks to reduce CPU usage. 

     - Global alert view now has a button to open the alert in a separate window for easier viewing at higher resolution 

     - Sync'ing all cameras to a timestamp will now also set speed of all cameras to 1.0 

     - Super-wide cameras no longer mess up aspect ratio of other cameras in the system.       - Another fix to address choppy video playback on local network. 

     - Fix issue that viewing a high-resolution camera could erroneously cause the system to think it's too busy and suggest that you to disable some cameras. 

 Coral USB AI accelerator Details: 

     - This is an experimental feature, and only spend the money on the Coral USB stick if you're okay giving it a try to see what you can get. If you try it, please share your experience. 

     - Having the accelerator will improve the ability to handle simultaneous detections on multiple cameras, and will do better at handling busy scenes. It will also reduce CPU usage a bit -- but because video encoding and decoding are still constraints we don't think it will allow for significantly more camera capacity on the same hardware. 

     - You can see the buying options by clicking "buy" on this page.

     - To use it, plug it into one of the BLUE usb 3.0 ports, and restart your Camect device. When it's working, you'll see the LED on the accelerator flash when it's being used to analyze some motion. 

 Local Audio Announcements Details: 

     - You can ask your device to announce detections locally by checking "play voice alert" on the alerts tab, and choosing output "speaker". 

     - This feature has been visible in the UI for a while, but was not actually working. 

     - You should now be able hear announcements if you plug some speakers or headphones into the headphone jack. In theory you might also be able to use USB speakers, although we have not tested this.

[Wendell Morris]

The ability to go straight to a higher resolution playback from the Global Alert view is huge improvement!  This saves a ton of clicks/taps when you need to review several alerts from the day.  Thanks!

[Victoria Wang]

Thanks for the update! Just want to make sure that one click of the button to go to the separate page doesn't go to the highest resolution, only goes to the higher resolution right? 

[Wendell Morris]

Correct, but you can still get to the highest resolution version with another click (using the same button in the upper right that you normally use to switch resolution).  And this new feature is on a separate button from the one that pulls up the clip on the matrix view window, so you can still access the original function as well.  This new feature just makes it a lot simpler to get to a view where you can see details of the clip if you’re using a larger screen device (e.g. iPad or PC) and then automatically go back to the Global Alerts view when you’re done.