Monitoring when everyone's away

OdinCam can start monitoring by itself when everyone has left, and stop when someone comes home. It goes by the iPhones and iPads that you let tell it when they're home.

To let an iPhone or iPad tell OdinCam when it's home:

1. On that iPhone or iPad, open OdinCam and tap Home & Away (the house button on the cameras screen, or Camera Settings › Home & Away).
2. Turn on Use This iPhone to Tell When I'm Home.
3. When iOS asks about location, choose Allow While Using App, then Change to Always Allow when it asks again. "Always" lets OdinCam notice you leaving even when the app is closed.
4. Tap Set Home to Where I Am Now while you're at home, or Adjust on Map to put the pin on your house.
5. Do the same on everyone else's iPhone.

To have a camera start and stop by itself:

1. On the Mac, open Settings › Schedule. On an iPhone or iPad, open Home & Away and tap the camera.
2. Turn on Start Monitoring When Everyone's Away.
3. Leave Stop Monitoring When Someone Comes Home on, unless you want monitoring to carry on after you get back.

How it decides:

• Home means inside about 150 metres of home, or on the same Wi-Fi as a camera. Away means more than about 300 metres away. The gap in between is on purpose: walking to the mailbox doesn't count as leaving.
• Everyone's away when every phone that tells OdinCam says it's away.
• If a phone hasn't checked in for a day (switched off, out of battery), OdinCam says it can't tell, and leaves monitoring as it is. Turn on Also Start When OdinCam Can't Tell if you'd rather it started anyway.
• It only acts when something changes. If you stop monitoring yourself while everyone's away, it stays stopped.
• Each time it starts or stops by itself, every iPhone and iPad in the household gets an alert such as "Started monitoring: everyone's away."

How it works with your schedule: everyone leaving is the same as pressing Start Monitoring. Your schedule still decides which hours record, exactly as it does when you press the button yourself. So if the schedule says Don't Monitor outside its times, an empty house outside those times stays unrecorded, and the alert says when the schedule will start it.

Without "Always" location, OdinCam can only tell from the home Wi-Fi, and only when iOS lets the app run, so it notices less reliably. Home & Away says when this is the case.

Privacy: only "home" or "away" and the time ever leave your iPhone, encrypted so that only your household's devices can read them. Your location and your home's position stay on the iPhone. The server only sees that a phone sent something.