Parking Mode: Getting real-time impact notifications - the cheapest solution

[Mtz]

This is also my story:
- if you want a dashcam and want real-time impact notifications you need a dashcam which already supports this. I don't have, but my A329T 3CH is too good to abandon it for a dashcam with cloud support for now.
- I just want instant impact notification, right now I don't need snapshots or videos stored on cloud
- I have an abandoned but good Android smartphone. I have one with Android 11 and one with Android 12
- the cigarette lighter socket of the car working only when engine is on
- I also have a spare SIM card which I am not using it right now
- I want just SMS notification, not email, even are possible also email notifications
- in Romania the cheapest subscription to a mobile operator is about 2 Euros and contains unlimited SMS, unlimited internet and 200 free calls.
- searched for an APP and I found the Automate which is free for my level of requirements

Even I am not a software developer, right after I installed it I understood how it is working and I was creating my first flow which was doing what I want but with some errors. Next day I fixed the errors and I already have 4 days of tests and everything is normal.

If you want to apply this solution
1. Install the Automate App
2. Load the Car Parking Impact Detection T1.flo from the ZIP file (T1 means that is for testing, to check if it is working OK with your Android smartphone.)
3. Check all Permissions
4. Start the flow and keep the smartphone on your hands.
5. From time to time just shake it in the hands and check if you see the display toast about the alarm setting.
6. Then connect the smartphone to a power source, shake it from time to time and you should not receive more notifications. After disconnecting the power source you should receive the Alarm setting notification again.

This is how it is looking the flow and you can edit with the values you want.

Please respect the work from here and if anybody wants to put on the Automate website their Impact notification flow inspired from here, please give credits to Dashcamtalk thread. I don't need credits, but I want for this forum. Thanks!

enjoy,
Mtz

 

[Mtz]

Reserved for suggestions

Please remember that I made all those in just 2 days and I am not an IT guy. I hope the real developers will understand.

Suggestions, but never affect the instant notification:
1. If you want to develop much more my idea try to stay under 30 Blocks so we can use the App for free.
2. Will be nice to have some option to check the battery level and send a SMS about it. For example I parked the car two days ago, nobody hit it, but the smartphone battery is 5%. The App to send me a notification about this.
3. Viofo have a Geofencing feature which means that parking mode will be disabled at that parking location set by the user. Can be interesting to set such a location also in the flow, but I consider is not necessary, because if nobody is hitting the car, the smartphone will just stay in standby.
4 Now my solution of adding a delay is helping to avoid the false alarm when getting out from the car.
Will be nice to develop some flow to avoid false alarm when getting into the car. But such a flow will delay all notifications in parking mode and I dont want this. Because you can not postpone a SMS when charger is not detected, hoping at that at some moment you will enter the car, start the car engine and the flow to cancel sending the SMS because car charger was detected.
But maybe the flow can be modified in some way that Automate it will detect my personal smartphone bluetooth signal and it will pause the flow before I will enter into the car until I will start the car engine.


Some functions and explanations of the test version of the flow:
When you see in the log the @1... @2... @3, etc, they are the number of the Blocks. When you will see another block for Delay, for example, this means the smartphone detected something
For example, just look at the above LOG screenshot and the delay blocks meaning are:
Block 4 appears in the log only when there is a charger detected
Block 5 appears in the log only when there is no charger detected
Block 7 appears in the log only before sending the SMS (or alarm set)

Please consider:
- before using the SMS solution go in Automate setting for SMS and set more than 10 SMS a day. I set 100 SMS a day because I have free SMS.
- after some tests with two smartphones and different Android version installed, I observed that until Android 12, after the lock screen the CPU is not detecting impacts. I modified the flow to add a Keep Awake CPU block. It is working but using much more power. Maybe can be applied some other solution than mine to avoid too much battery usage.
You can test this behavior only by sending SMS and not setting the Alarm hour because you will not see the toss messages about Alarm Set. For Android versions under Android 12 you can not properly test the T1 flo.

 

[Mtz]

Versions:

1. Mtz V1 for Android 12 and above: Car Parking Impact Detection A12_V1 (This version is for Android versions above Android 12).
You need to edit the SMS number.



Reserved for solutions