Latitude/longitude problems and more general daylight and schedule discussion
I quite like the ability to manage things from a "sunrise" and "sunset" concept, but I'm having problems with the derived latitude/longitude. My timezone map setting is correct (~45.5 degrees latitude, ~-122.6 longitude) from the pin that I have put in the Time Zone setting in the System Preferences. However, SS claims that I am at 34 degrees latitude and -118 longitude. This is a significant difference in hours of daylight. What is the logic in disallowing override for more exact lat/lon settings? Clearly whatever is being read out of the system is not matching what I have set, so being able to offset this would be useful.
Also problematic is the fact that there is only one "daylight" schedule available. I have cameras on three continents talking to the same system, so the daylight concept is entirely blown apart. It would seem to be useful to have the lat/lon and +/- settings be able to be defined as a table, and then each schedule could be tied to one of the daylight table entries. While this may seem an edge case, look at it in a different way: I have cameras inside buildings where the daylight offset is hours different than cameras outside. With a more sophisticated ability to influence cameras (see below) this becomes relevant to allow schedules to understand "daylight" with more flexibility.
Lastly, having schedules able to create changes on cameras would be quite useful. My nighttime camera triggers for some devices should be much more sensitive than daylight (shadows, movement are different.) For some, the opposite is true (insects, etc.) It seems that the schedule should be able to cause changes to the configuration of each camera independently. Currently, I'm doing some of this via Indigo (home automation) and pushing changes via the Cynical SecuritySpy Controls plugin through the SS API, but it is odd that SS itself cannot make such changes. The plugin is not stable and often fails, and having this natively via SS would be a help and also would be useful to people who do not wish to run an entirely different codebase to make changes to SS camera configurations.
JT
Also problematic is the fact that there is only one "daylight" schedule available. I have cameras on three continents talking to the same system, so the daylight concept is entirely blown apart. It would seem to be useful to have the lat/lon and +/- settings be able to be defined as a table, and then each schedule could be tied to one of the daylight table entries. While this may seem an edge case, look at it in a different way: I have cameras inside buildings where the daylight offset is hours different than cameras outside. With a more sophisticated ability to influence cameras (see below) this becomes relevant to allow schedules to understand "daylight" with more flexibility.
Lastly, having schedules able to create changes on cameras would be quite useful. My nighttime camera triggers for some devices should be much more sensitive than daylight (shadows, movement are different.) For some, the opposite is true (insects, etc.) It seems that the schedule should be able to cause changes to the configuration of each camera independently. Currently, I'm doing some of this via Indigo (home automation) and pushing changes via the Cynical SecuritySpy Controls plugin through the SS API, but it is odd that SS itself cannot make such changes. The plugin is not stable and often fails, and having this natively via SS would be a help and also would be useful to people who do not wish to run an entirely different codebase to make changes to SS camera configurations.
JT
Comments
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Hi JT,
The lat/lon discrepancy sounds strange - please could you email us a screenshot of the System Preferences > Date & Time > Time Zone window as well as SecuritySpy's Preferences > Scheduling > Advanced Schedule Options window that we can see the differences here. The information for both should be coming from the same source, so this is quite confusing.
We haven't allowed for an override here simply because no one has requested this. I don't think many users are actually using this feature, and for those who are, the information that SecuritySpy is obtaining is correct.
I understand from your description how having multiple sunrise/sunset schedules, each with different offsets, would be useful. Perhaps we could add some flexibility here, I will consider how we could best implement this.
As for adjusting settings based on schedules, I can't imagine a way to implement this that wouldn't add a lot of complexity to the UI. One workaround to achieve this is to add the same camera to SecuritySpy twice - then you can have different settings for the "daytime" instance and the "nighttime" instance.
