NAME¶

zmtrigger.pl - ZoneMinder External Trigger Script

DESCRIPTION¶

This script is used to trigger and cancel alarms from external connections using an arbitrary text based format.

This script offers generic solution to external triggering of alarms. It can handle external connections via either internet socket, unix socket or file/device interfaces. You can either use it 'as is' if you can interface with the existing format, or override connections and channels to customise it to your needs.

If enabled by the OPT_TRIGGERS option, Zoneminder service start zmtrigger.pl which listens for control messages on TCP port 6802.

TRIGGER MESSAGE FORMAT¶

id|action|score|cause|text|showtext

id

  is the id number or name of the ZM monitor.
    

action

  Valid actions are 'on', 'off', 'cancel' or 'show' where
  'on' forces an alarm condition on;
  'off' forces an alarm condition off;
  'cancel' negates the previous 'on' or 'off';
  'show' updates the auxiliary text represented by the %Q 
  placeholder, which can optionally be added to the affected monitor's
  timestamp label format.
  
  Ordinarily you would use 'on' and 'cancel', 'off' would tend to be
  used to suppress motion based events. Additionally 'on' and 'off' can
  take an additional time offset, e.g. on+20 which automatically
  cancel's the previous action after that number of seconds.
    

score

  is the score given to the alarm, usually to indicate it's
  importance. For 'on' triggers it should be non-zero, otherwise it should
  be zero.
    

cause

  is a 32 char max string indicating the reason for, or source of
  the alarm e.g. 'Relay 1 open'. This is saved in the 'Cause' field of the
  event. Ignored for 'off' or 'cancel' messages.
    

text

  is a 256 char max additional info field, which is saved in the
  'Description' field of an event. Ignored for 'off' or 'cancel' messages.
    

showtext

  is up to 32 characters of text that can be displayed in the
  timestamp that is added to images. The 'show' action is designed to
  update this text without affecting alarms but the text is updated, if
  present, for any of the actions. This is designed to allow external input
  to appear on the images captured, for instance temperature or personnel
  identity etc.
    

  Note that multiple messages can be sent at once and should be LF or CRLF
  delimited. This script is not necessarily intended to be a solution in
  itself, but is intended to be used as 'glue' to help ZoneMinder interface
  with other systems. It will almost certainly require some customisation
  before you can make any use of it. If all you want to do is generate alarms
  from external sources then using the ZoneMinder::SharedMem perl module is
  likely to be easier.

EXAMPLES¶

  3|on+10|1|motion|text|showtext

Triggers 'alarm' on camera #3 for 10 seconds with score=1, cause='motion'.