Is there a way to have the system make a phone call?

tadol
tadol
in Home automation

So I have a bunch of cameras around my warehouse, and I get a fair number of emails every day ( and a fair number at night ) that I look over to see if any problems, which there usually aren’t, but it doesn’t prevent my wife from worrying. What I would really like to rig up is a piece of hardware that would call my cell phone if motion is detected on my interior cameras during evening/nighttime hours. That way, if there was a break-in, rather than getting another email I wouldn’t look at until the next day, I’d get a phone call so I would be awakened and check on the situation right away. But I don’t know if there is any hardware available that could do this - any ideas?

Comments

  • JoshADC
    JoshADC

    I'm not sure about a phone call, but you can use the "Run shell command" feature in Actions tab to send you an iMessage. I have my computer running SecuritySpy signed into a different AppleID than my phone, and I that AppleID has its own messaging/ringtone, and also has permission to bypass any do-not-disturb settings on my phone. If you want to test it before wrapping it in a script, paste this in a terminal window, replacing the 212 phone number here with your phone number. It has to be in this format, country code, etc, I just picked New York City in the USA as an easy example.


     osascript -e 'tell application "Messages"

        set targetService to 1st service whose service type = iMessage

        set targetBuddy to buddy "+12123435445" of targetService

        send "Motion on warehouse camera" to targetBuddy

     end tell'

  • Ben
    Ben

    iMessage is a good idea. It's also possible to use a script to make a FaceTime call (there's an example script for this on our AppleScript Examples page).

    Another option is push notifications to our iOS app. One solution could be to keep using email for all/general alerts, and enable push notifications only for the most important cameras.

Categories