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.

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.

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.