Zone '0' info, MV Sense.

[Andrewbluepiano]

Hi, 

This may be a question for the API area, but is there a way to change, or even just see the people sensing sensitivity for the full frame, zone 0? 

Mainly I am wondering if zone 0's returned people count is actually a people count, or if it is just overall motion, as I am getting mixed results from tests. 

It doesn't seem like you can specify a zone with the full frame otherwise. 

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

>but is there a way to change, or even just see the people sensing sensitivity

They call this the "confidence".  There is no way to see the confidence score for the "object" being reported as a person.  In my experience - it is pretty accurate.

>Mainly I am wondering if zone 0's returned people count is actually a people count, or if it is just overall motion

It is a people count.

[Andrewbluepiano]

Cool. I was thinking in terms of when you create a new zone, where you can specify the confidence level required to register a person. I actually wanted it to be less confident, trying to register motion / activity more than just people, basically have a 1% zone on the entire FOV, but whatever the default is seems to be doing alright. 

[PhilipDAth]

Why don't you use the motion detection feature and use a webhook to send it to your app?

https://documentation.meraki.com/MV/Advanced_Configuration/Motion_Alerts 

https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/webhooks/#webhook-sample-alerts/sample29 

https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/webhooks/ 

[Andrewbluepiano]

Thats actually the plan (eventually). At this point its still a script, not an app.

The basic idea I am implementing is that camera alerts are really only a concern when you aren't home. So to check if you are home, check the network and bluetooth clients for devices that you take with you when you leave the house. (reword for business applications)

I ended up using the idea as a school project (So on a sharp time limit), and at this point my goal was to end up with a python script that anyone with an MVx2 or better can use without having to set up a Webhooks server or anything, pure API. 

The result: https://github.com/andrewbluepiano/SmarterSecurityCamera-MVSense

Eventually in the next few weeks I will thread client parsing in the python version, then make a Webhook version of the same idea, likely using email alerts. But that all went beyond the scope of what I am trying to accomplish, basically a proof of concept. 

[PhilipDAth]

That is a cool school project.

[PhilipDAth]

One thing I do in my code is once I get a motion trigger I ignore more motion triggers until 500ms has passed.  Otherwise it can generate a lot of alerts.

Although Python is rather slow, so you might find it can't process it faster than 500ms anyway ...

[Andrewbluepiano]

It isn't too much problem right now, as all the network calls, parsing jsons, and iterating through the returned list of clients and bluetooth devices takes upwards of 3-4 seconds with my small network.

Thats for sure something I will do once that part gets threaded though! Any reason you chose 500ms by any chance?

[PhilipDAth]

More than 2 alerts a second is a real pain.

I tend to use node.js.  Mostly because it is a million times faster than Python.  With node.js I can spit out alerts every 200ms (which is the rate limit for the Meraki dashboard API).

If I don't introduce deliberate delays I just get back dashboard API call failures.

[Andrewbluepiano]

That explains a few empty responses I had when testing. Yeah, I think for python even parsing a json takes longer than that 😅, so it wasn't a persistent issue.