PIR triggering: Only report motion to server if armed = true

[Chris]

I want to place my PIR sensor in the most high traffic area possible, to maximise chance of detection when the system is armed - this seems like a reasonable tactic.

The down side is that while the system is disarmed, people will be triggering the sensor all the time, which will seriously eat into my allowed daily event usage.

I don't want to place unnecessary workload on the PrivateEyePi servers, or flood my dashboard with spurious event logs, so:

Is there a simple way to make the Pi check if it's armed before sending certain updates to the server?

Ideally I'd like to customise it so that some devices (like temp sensors) communicate all the time, while others only push updates to the server if the system is armed.

I'm guessing this will need to be a change in the python code running on the Pi, since changing rules on the dashboard is all server side coding, done after the event is already reported.

Any help would be much appreciated, and hopefully useful to others as well.

[Gadjet Nut]

There is no way of knowing when the server is armed or disarmed, unless you poll th server, which will only add to the server traffic. The best strategy is to set the PIR with a long reset interval. The PIR we sell has a max reset interval of 4 minutes. You can extend that by modifying alarm.py with a delay.

Another option is to use our high availability service which has unlimited messages per day (go to the store and. Search for high availability).

[Chris]

Hmm.

My software experience is limited, but this changes my understanding of how this system works.

I was of the impression that the server side software & website dashboard was independent of the security system running on the Raspberry Pi, merely providing a nice, accessible graphical interface.

It sounds like you're saying the system running on the Raspberry Pi has no awareness of its local state and will not function independently if contact with the server is lost.

For instance, if I arm the system (whether locally using a button or from the dashboard) and connection with the server is lost due to an internet dropout, will the alarm still sound if an armed zone is tripped?

I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth, one cannot complain about a free system, I'm just trying to understand how it works.

Thanks for your prompt reply.

[Gadjet Nut]

It's a cloud based solution where events are passed to and processed in the cloud. The likelihood of loosing the internet does need to be considered but for most home use cases it offers sufficient level of monitoring and alerting. The dashboard tells you if the raspberry pi is offline, and our high availability solution notifies you via text or email is the Raspberry Pi is offline. 

[Chris]

That sounds like the best bet.
I agree, the probability that the Internet connection will be down at the moment an intruder strikes is fairly unlikely.
As I said it wasn't a criticism, I didn't understand it was a cloud based system.
Thanks again.