What This App Does
Sentinel Mobile Monitor watches your camera and microphone, records clips when a threshold is crossed, stores those clips locally, adds sidecar JSON metadata, and can notify you through Telegram. It can also tag clips with local AI and describe clips with Google Gemini if you enable that feature.
First-Time Setup
- Open Monitoring Settings to review thresholds and clip storage. Clips are stored in this browser on the device.
- Use Test Video in Live Sensors to confirm your camera and microphone are working before you arm monitoring.
- Watch the live meters. Raise thresholds if the app is too sensitive, or lower them if it is missing events.
- If you want alerts, open Telegram Delivery and save your bot token, chat ID, and clip attachment preference.
- If you want cloud descriptions, open Google Gemini, save your API key, choose a model, and save your prompt.
Live Sensors
- Start Monitoring arms the camera and microphone so clips can be recorded.
- Test Video shows the live feed and meters without creating clips.
- Microphone level shows the live audio signal level.
- Motion level shows frame-difference motion from the camera preview.
- Last trigger shows the most recent reason for a recorded event.
Monitoring Settings
- Audio threshold controls how loud sound must be before an audio trigger starts a clip.
- Do not trigger on audio keeps the audio meter live but prevents sound from starting clips.
- Motion threshold controls how much movement must be seen before a motion trigger starts a clip.
- Do not trigger on motion keeps the camera preview live but prevents movement from starting clips.
- Clip length controls how long each incident clip records.
- Cooldown sets how long the app waits after a clip before it can trigger again.
Telegram Delivery
Telegram lets the app send incident alerts to your Telegram account.
- Open Telegram and talk to BotFather.
- Create a bot and copy the bot token BotFather gives you.
- Send at least one message to your bot from the Telegram account or group that should receive alerts.
- Get the chat ID for that conversation. For a private chat, you can use a Telegram bot helper or the Bot API
getUpdates method after messaging your bot. - Paste the bot token and chat ID into Telegram Delivery, choose whether to attach clips, then save settings.
- Use Send Test Notification to confirm Telegram is working before you rely on it.
- Enable Telegram alerts turns alert delivery on and off.
- Rate limit stops the app from sending too many alerts too quickly.
- Attach recorded clip chooses whether Telegram receives the video file itself or just the alert message.
- Clip intro caption is the option that attempts to burn time, trigger, and AI tag information into the start of a saved clip.
Schedulers
- Send scheduled clip creates a Telegram clip on a repeating interval inside the scheduler window.
- Start/stop monitoring window arms monitoring at the start time and stops it at the end time, but only if the scheduler started that monitoring session.
- Clip schedulers only run while monitoring is active.
- Schedulers of the same type cannot overlap in this build.
Telegram Reply Commands
When Telegram is configured, you can reply to bot messages with natural language commands.
- Reply with phrases like start monitoring or arm system to arm monitoring from Telegram.
- Reply with phrases like stop monitoring or disarm system to stop monitoring.
- Reply with phrases like describe, describe this, or what happened to request the Gemini description for a clip message.
- Reply with phrases like show me the clip or show video to request the saved clip, if it still exists locally.
AI Assist
- AI sound recognition uses YAMNet to classify sounds and tag clips.
- AI video recognition uses local object recognition to tag frames and saved clips.
- Smart motion confirmation is an extra motion filter that looks for persistent movement patterns.
- AI tags are stored in each clip JSON sidecar and shown in the gallery when present.
Reference Gallery
Use Reference Gallery to build a local library of labeled people and objects for future recognition workflows.
- Add one or more images with Add Reference Images.
- Label each image with a name or object label.
- Add category and alias information so future AI workflows have more context.
Google Gemini
- Enable Gemini analysis turns on cloud descriptions for saved clips.
- Google AI API key must be saved before Gemini can be used.
- Gemini model lets you switch between the configured Flash-Lite models.
- Use reference images includes the labeled reference gallery as added context for Gemini prompts.
- Analysis prompt controls what Gemini is asked to describe.
- You can describe one clip at a time or multiple selected clips from the gallery.
Incident Timeline and Recent Video Clips
- Incident Timeline shows recorded events by hour.
- From and To narrow the visible date window.
- Show incidents only hides empty timeline slots.
- Recent Video Clips shows saved clips as a thumbnail gallery.
- Search tags / AI filters by comma-separated search terms against local AI tags and Gemini descriptions.
- Thumbnails per row changes gallery density.
- Select Visible, Zip Selected, and Delete Selected work on multiple clips at once.
- Each clip card supports full-size viewing, Gemini description, local AI tagging, Telegram send, path copy, and delete.
Files Written by the App
- Each recorded clip is stored in this browser on the device.
- Each clip should have a matching
.sentinel.json sidecar with trigger reason, AI tags, classification data, and Gemini results when available. - Reference images also receive their own metadata sidecar files.
Troubleshooting
- If nothing triggers, lower thresholds or use Test Video to watch the live meters.
- If Telegram tests fail, re-check the bot token, chat ID, and whether the bot has been messaged from that chat.
- If Gemini descriptions fail, verify the API key, model setting, and network availability.
- If a clip is missing from the gallery, use Refresh Clips to reload browser storage.
