The video below goes over how to create a Sensor Alert within Portal 2.0. This video and others can be found at our Growlink University webpage.
Audio Transcript:
Hey, this is Josh with Growlink, and in today's walkthrough we'll be going over how to make a sensor alert within Portal 2.0. You'll start by logging into Portal 2.0, accessing the controller that you wish to make the sensor alert on, and then hitting the rules section up at the top of the webpage.
Once at the rules webpage, you'll select the rule folder and the rule group that you wish to make this rule in. In this case, we'll choose both the default rule folder and default rule group, followed by going to the alerts section and tapping add alert.
First, we want to choose what sensor we want to look at. In this case, we're making an example alert where if the room gets too hot, we want it to notify us of that temperature difference. So, in this case, we're going to select sensor and choose room temperature here.
Next, we want to choose the comparison and the threshold. In this case, we're going to choose the comparison of above and set the threshold of 90 degrees. So, in this case, if the room goes above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it'll try and send out an alert to notify you of those readings.
Next, we want to choose the time of day for this sensor alert. We have a couple of different options. We can choose all day, day only, night only, and custom time. In this example, we're just going to choose all day because we want to know any time it gets above 90 degrees in this room.
Next, we want to specify a minimum duration. This specifies the minimum amount of time that the sensor has to record a value above or below the desired threshold before it will send out an alert. In this case, we'll choose a minimum duration of two minutes.
And then from here, we're going to specify what emails we want to associate with these alerts. So, in this case, we'll just make an example email. With all of these data populated, you'll see the summary sentence up at the top where if the room temp exceeds 90 degrees Fahrenheit for at least two minutes, it's going to shoot out an email alert to this example, email@exampledomain.com.
If you wanted to send a text message to your phone, you can do so. You just need to put in the phone number and the email to SMS text domain that your phone provider provides. For example, if you had a Verizon phone and you had a fake phone number here, you could get that sent to your phone by putting in your phone number @vtext.com, which is the email to SMS provider for Verizon specifically, and then hit send push notifications, this toggle at the bottom. So, in this case, you not only get an email sent to your email address, but also a potential push notification sent to your phone. Note that each phone provider has a different email to text domain, so one may need to google what domain is appropriate for your phone provider.
Keep in mind that these email to SMS domains are provided by your phone provider, and if you send a ton of alerts, they could think that they're spam and defer them from sending by up to 24 hours. It's for this reason that we always recommend having both an email address and a phone number if you prefer to get push notifications to your phone, as the email alerts will always get sent, but your phone alerts could get deferred by the phone provider.
With that made, all that's left is to add the alert. And since the alerts are all a back-end framework, it isn’t related to the controller specifically and is not a configuration that's stored on the controller. As such, you don't need to push an update to the controller's configuration for the alert to be active.
This concludes how you'd set up a sensor alert within Portal 2.0.