The new easy Scheduling feature

Today, we have pushed out our new scheduling feature for plug and play (PnP) cameras (Axis and Panasonic), responding to calls from many users of SecurityStation for more flexibility in recording. It is now possible to set up a recording and alerting schedule for each individual plug and play camera in your account.

Up until now, when a camera was added to SecurityStation its recording was ‘armed’ 24/7, meaning that any events triggered at any time of the day would be recorded, and alerts emailed to your users. Many SecurityStation users have asked for the flexibility to set timeframes where their cameras are not armed for recording, such as when they are in the office and their cameras are triggering frequently. This kind of event behaviour can use up your event allowances quickly as well as cause an email overload.

How does the new scheduling feature work?

The new scheduling feature works when you select start and stop recording timeframes on selected days of the week in order to build up a schedule where the camera is both armed and disarmed for recording and alerting (though camera offline alerts are unaffected by schedules).

We’ve built the scheduling system around a scenario where cameras are disarmed 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday – the most common schedule times, but it is flexible. You can, for instance, set schedules that run around the clock, or operate for only 15 minutes per day. The flexibility is there to do what you need, up to a maximum of 7 scheduled time frames, and for each camera individually. On top of this you can overide any active schedule at any time by simply turning off alerts and recording with the recording and alerts on/off button on your Dashboard. Reactivating alerts and recording in the same way kicks all schedules back into action.

How do I create a schedule?

Creating schedules is easy. You access the scheduling page either from your camera’s edit page, available from the Dashboard. Let’s take the 9-5 scenario as our example. SecurityStation allows you to set start (arm) and stop (disarm) timeframes down to an interval of 15 minutes. So, to arm your camera for recording with the standard working hours of Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm you would set three schedule timeframes as follows:

• Monday – Friday 0000 to 0900
• Monday – Friday 1700 to 2400
• Saturday and Sunday 0000 to 2400

Because in SecurityStation schedules are ‘inclusive’, not ‘exclusive’, we’re choosing only the time frames where we want the camera to be recording and alerting. Outside these hours we don’t want detected motion to create events in SecurityStation, so we leave these timeframes unaccounted (remember, we don’t want events generated during office hours).

To create your first schedule click the button Create a schedule and a new set of fields appears for selecting which days of the week your schedule will be active, plus the arm/disarm timeframe on those days.

The "create a schedule" popout box

After creating the Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm scenario as above your schedule should look like this:

The Scheduling User Interface

You can have up to 7 separate time frames running per camera in SecurityStation, allowing for a greater degree of flexibility in accommodating the needs of both companies and home users.

Of course, if you choose not to record to a schedule that’s fine. Your cameras will be armed 24/7.

About the Scheduling UI

We have also made some small UI improvements in a number of areas including:

• A new clock icon on the Dashboard depicts when a schedule is active;
• The addition of a delete camera icon on the Dashboard in order to free up some space for the link to scheduling for each camera;

Dashboard camera widget

• Change of test access button – this button is a heavily used and useful feature and we’ve placed a bit more emphasis on it;
• Change of camera reboot icon – we felt the previous icon was a little confusing and could result in unintentional camera reboots.

Camera edit page UI changes

Do you have feedback on the new feature?

Do you like the new scheduling feature? Do you have any suggested improvements? Either way we’d like to hear from you. Let us know in the comments below.

When an IP camera is connected to the SecurityStation VSaaS service, the camera and the service talk to each other constantly in a kind of permanent handshake. This handshake, or ‘heartbeat’, as we call it here, is constructed using a tiny amount of data (so no worries about how much data your camera is transferring) and means that SecurityStation is always aware of your camera’s online status.

Connections using the Internet are rarely guaranteed for 100% uptime, especially for home and small business broadband connections. In our experience, Internet connections are frequently dropping off and coming back on again, and when you throw Wi-Fi, multiple ISPs, Internet backbone issues, TCP/IP connection drops, router malfunctions and more into the mix, no connection is really online all of the time. This has effects on the efficacy of the heartbeat system in SecurityStation. What good would it be if it warned you for every one of these drop-offs? You’d be bombarded with emails and warnings.

So, the SecurityStation heartbeat is built intelligently and factors this into its operation. You won’t be bombarded, but you will be notified when there is real downtime. The system checks and double-checks before emailing you.

The situation is analogous to setting up video motion detection (VMD) and this concept informed us when we created the SecurityStation heartbeat. With VMD you choose a detection area and overall sensitivity for detection in your ‘scene’ and the goal is to only have the camera trigger or alert when it detects something real like an intruder, not when, for instance, a nearby tree is blowing in the wind. This VMD noise is the bane of most CCTV systems (not ours, we hope) and various architectures, clever systems and complicated analytics have been developed to get around the problem. Nevertheless, it remains a problem.

And so it is with the SecurityStation heartbeat. When you are alerted that your camera is offline, it most likely is offline. When you are alerted that it’s back online, it most likely is online. All cameras will drop off from time to time, which is another reason why we recommend using a plug-and-play IP camera with SecurityStation. The heartbeat is more reliable with plug-and-play and the two systems work seamlessly together.

The SecurityStation heartbeat is especially important for surveillance where remote monitoring is paramount. You can always be sure of your camera’s status and can rely on SecurityStation to deliver the right information. That said, you can also turn it off, if required.

This new feature was built for customers with wireless cameras to pro-actively check whether their camera is connected and online in SecurityStation, avoiding the necessary wait (albeit short) before SecurityStation itself picks up the camera. In short, if the camera is connected clicking ‘Test access’ will immediately bring the camera online within the account. It takes the guess-work out of camera installation and is particularly useful for plug and play where feedback from the camera is limited.

We’ll be hooking this up to work with manually added (port forwarded) cameras shortly.

You’ll find the new test access feature on the camera edit page.

While the ability to pause and take snapshots in SecurityStation has been present from the beginning, the inability to remotely operate digital PTZ in cameras has, up until now, been a restriction.

In many scenarios, having the ability to digitally manipulate the camera’s field of view is a distinct advantage. So we’re proud to announce that SecurityStation now supports digital PTZ in the following Axis plug and play models, with more to come:

Axis P3343
Axis P3343-V
Axis P3343-VE
Axis P3344
Axis P3344-V
Axis P3344-VE
Axis P1343
Axis P1343-E
Axis M3014

To give you an idea of what this new feature will look like on your screen, here is a snapshot:

We hope you find this new feature useful. We’re constantly looking to improve SecurityStation for our users, so if you have any feedback about our implementation of digital PTZ, or any other aspects of the service, please let us know.

The widening range of supported cameras means that SecurityStation plug and play has become available for camera installations of all sorts, including indoor and outdoor, static and pan-tilt-zoom as well as scenarios requiring vandal resistant or unobtrusive camera solutions. With Axis and Panasonic being our best-selling brands of IP cameras, SecurityStation plug and play has now become accessible to a huge user base.

The main benefit of plug and play is ease of use, both for setup as well as for modifying important camera settings. SecurityStation plug and play is for non-technical customers who wish to use cameras but don’t yet do so because of technical barriers. SecurityStation plug and play makes IP-based CCTV available to everyone.

See the full list of cameras with Plug and Play support in SecurityStation.

We think these settings are ‘just right’ in that they won’t trigger too often, but won’t miss too much in low-movement scenarios.

However, these average settings are not right for all cameras. Video motion detection (VMD) is the most common way of detecting whether activity should be recorded and getting the settings right is a trial and error process (see screenshot). Our Goldilocks settings only go so far, so we encourage you to tailor your VMD settings to suit your situation. SecurityStation’s default settings are designed to work best when there is supposed to be no movement occurring, so that when there is movement this is detected and events are generated. If you’re putting a camera in a high-movement area then these settings will result in the camera frequently triggering recordings, making it very difficult to filter out what you want to see from what you don’t.

So, after adding your camera(s) to SecurityStation, take the time to get your video motion detection settings right in relation to the view the camera has and for the kind of movement you expect to capture. Consider the size of the object involved, the sensitivity of the trigger and the area you want to cover.

Once you’ve set up VMD for your camera, make regular checks to ensure that everything still works as you expect and that you don’t mentally background your security system. This is good practice with any security system and SecurityStation is no different.

Secondly, we offer a choice of connection methods. We have developed, in-house, a unique plug-and-play system that already works for Panasonic BL- and BB-range cameras and is currently in the process of being rolled out to a range of Axis cameras. If you prefer to configure your cameras manually that option is also available through our manual configuration facility. Why offer both of these methods? Flexibility. Plug and play is quicker and easier and provides the same feature set as manually configuring your cameras, but experienced customers with knowledge of router configurations, port forwarding and dynamic DNS might require a finer level of control that plug and play does not offer.

Our working process has been about tailoring SecurityStation to our customers. Where it is possible and beneficial, we want to provide choice. That’s been our philosophy during the development of SecurityStation, and it will continue to be so as we refine and expand the service.