Home Sentinel — Support

Home Sentinel shows you what is happening at home: which cameras are recording, who has been seen, and which of those sightings were worth raising. It is a client only — the recognition runs on a machine in your home, and the app displays what that machine reports.

1.What you need

• An iPhone running a recent version of iOS.
• A Home Sentinel server already running in your home.
• An account on that server, created by whoever administers it.

There is no sign-up in the app. If you do not already have an account, the app cannot create one for you — ask the person who runs the system.

2.The three screens

• Live — every camera, grouped by site, with its current recording state. A camera that has stopped recording says so rather than showing a stale frame.
• Alerts — sightings that were judged worth raising. The filter separates real alerts from raw stranger detections, because most raw detections are not alerts and showing them as though they were is how a monitoring system trains you to ignore it.
• Events — a plain-language timeline of what happened: faces seen, vehicles recognised, and cameras that went quiet.

3.Common problems

“Incorrect username or password.” The server does not say which of the two was wrong, so that an attacker cannot use the app to discover valid usernames. Check both. If the administrator has changed your password, every device signed in with the old one is signed out.

Signed in, but a screen says access is denied. Accounts carry a scope. Some accounts are allowed to see devices but not cameras. Signing in again will not change this — the administrator has to widen the account's scope.

Nothing loads. The app reaches your home server over an encrypted tunnel. If the tunnel or the server is down, the app will say so instead of showing old data. Pull down on any screen to retry.

A camera says it is not recording. That is the system reporting its own blind spot, and it is deliberate. The camera may be powered off, off the network, or its recorder may have stopped. It is worth checking rather than dismissing.

4.Privacy

The app collects nothing, contains no analytics or advertising identifiers, and sends no data to Graf Clouds. Details are in the Home Sentinel privacy policy.

5.Getting help

Write to [email protected]. Tell us which screen you were on, what you expected, and what happened instead. If the problem is with your own installation rather than the app, we will say so and point you at the part of the system to look at.