Feature Request: Tilt Angle Rule needed.

Mark Engelhardt

Robert Savage posted a nice article about a garage door application... http://community.supermechanical.com/index.php?p=/discussion/109/using-twine-to-monitor-garage-door-and-send-reminder-notifications#Item_2 which is almost what I need... But...

My garage door gets stuck when it its almost all the way down... So the feature I need is to have twine detect a small change in the orientation.. I need a rule that says if the the angle of the twine on one axis is between 85 and 0 the door is open (send a message every 1/2 hour) if the angle is 86-90, then the door is closed (send nothing)

Sorry to post this twice, but I wanted to get this registered as a Feature Request, not just a comment.

Gerry Mueller

If the orientation sensor provides this kind of data, this would be very useful.

However, what is also needed, that is not presently happening, is event based updating; eg, at present the Twine reports it's variables about once every 45 seconds (I suspect a compromise interval based on getting good life out of the batteries). Sensor like the mag switch, which you would probably put on a door, might open and close again within that reporting interval, and thus not get seen. Much better would be if once the mag switch opened, it would be monitored, say, once a second, and the number of seconds it was open was saved as a Twine variable.

But beyond this, I think what is needed is a much more sophisticated rules language that allows relating Twine variables with actions on a much more sophisticate basis than is presently possible. I'd like to be able to write Twine-based rules like:

IF "closed" THEN "open" THEN ":closed" AND WITHIN "120 seconds" [do nothing] ELSE [send intruder message]

That way people legitimately entering a house could be told to simply turn the Twine over on some other side when entering, but if that didn't happen, you's get a warning.

The other thing I'd like is the ability to generate Twine server based rules; eg. if Twine switches from USB to battery power, send a message (probably there's been a poser failure, but your WiFi router is still operating on UPS), and/or your Twine hasn't checked in for x minutes, indicating a power failure and either you didn't have UPS, or that too has died.

For all of this, however, we are probably looking at Twine 2.0 or even 3.0.

Robert Savage

I think the ability to configure rules where the conditions could have ranges of more granular angles of orientation would be extremely useful for other applications as well.