Hi all,
The first public test version of Sentinels is out, and I’m looking for testers. Sentinels watches the devices you already have in Homey and tells you what they are doing: when a pump runs and for how long, when a door is left open, when the voltage drops, when a sensor goes quiet.
It is read-only: it never sends a command to any device. It needs the Homey API permission (homey:manager:api) only because that is the only way to read devices that belong to other apps. Everything runs locally on the Homey, with no cloud account.
Current features
- Activity monitors: turn a power reading into cycles, duration and energy (pump, freezer, washer). The on/off threshold is learned from Homey Insights.
- State monitors: doors, lights, motion sensors, and appliance states such as “Running”.
- Voltage monitors: under and overvoltage per phase, one alert per incident.
- Groups: “are all doors closed?”, fired the moment one member is wrong.
- Availability: finds devices that stopped reporting, went unavailable or have a low battery. Nothing to set up.
- Alerts for the unusual, compared with each monitor’s own history:
- Still running long (while it is still running, at N x its usual cycle)
- Cycle unusually long, Cycle count reached
- Usually does not start in this hour
- Has not been active for N hours, Has a reading in the last N minutes
- Any … choice on every trigger: one Flow covers all your monitors.
- Ready-made messages in 10 languages, including Portuguese (Brazil).
- A Settings page and six dashboard widgets.
Current status
Version 1.0.11, test channel. Homey Pro with firmware 12.4.0 or newer. I run it every day on my own Homey Pro with 2 activity, 2 state and 3 voltage monitors and 4 groups covering 43 devices.
Install the test version
Manual, source and issues
Mini manual: homey-sentinels/MANUAL.md at main · gpmachado/homey-sentinels · GitHub
Source: GitHub - gpmachado/homey-sentinels: Homey app. · GitHub
Issues: Issues · gpmachado/homey-sentinels · GitHub
Open source, MIT license. Contributions are welcome: bug fixes, widgets, translations, documentation. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to run the tests without a Homey.
What would help most
- Appliances that report a state (“Running”, “Idle”) instead of on/off
- Large homes with many devices and groups
- Widgets on different phones and in dark mode
- Battery sensors and devices that go quiet for long periods
- The ready-made messages in Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish or Swedish: do they sound natural?
Known limitations
- Flow cards and the Settings page are in English only. The messages the app writes follow the language you pick in Settings.
- Cards that return numbers (statistics, reports) only show in Advanced Flow. That is a Homey rule.
- Widgets do not work in the Homey web app.
- Alerts that compare with “usual” need a few finished cycles first (5 for the usual duration, 20 for the usual hours).
When reporting a bug
Please post here or open a GitHub issue with:
- Homey model and firmware version
- Sentinels version
- The monitor type and the device (and which app it comes from)
- What you did, what you expected, what happened
- The log: turn on Detailed log in Sentinels Settings, repeat the problem, then send a diagnostics report from Homey and post its code
Thanks for testing!
