Canary Zone Settings Not Working? Motion Detection Fixes
Canary's motion detection zones, a feature often referred to as 'Masking', are essential for reducing unwanted notifications. By telling your camera to ignore motion in certain areas—like a busy street seen through a window or a ceiling fan—you can ensure you're only alerted to genuine events. When these zones stop working, your phone can be flooded with irrelevant alerts, defeating the purpose of the feature.
This guide will help you troubleshoot and fix issues with your Canary's zone settings, so you can get back to receiving only the alerts that matter.
### Step 1: Perform Basic Resets and Updates
Before diving into settings, let's start with the basics. Software glitches can often be resolved with a simple update and a reboot.
- Update the Canary App: Go to the App Store (for iOS) or Google Play Store (for Android) and check if there is an update available for the Canary app. Using an outdated version can sometimes cause issues with settings not syncing correctly.
- Check for Firmware Updates: Canary pushes firmware updates to your device automatically. However, you can check if it's up-to-date in the app's 'Device settings' section.
- Reboot Your Canary Device: A power cycle is a crucial troubleshooting step.
- Unplug your Canary camera from the power source.
- Wait for at least 30 seconds.
- Plug it back in and wait a few minutes for it to fully boot up and reconnect to the network. This simple restart often resolves temporary bugs affecting motion detection.
Step 2: Verify Your Canary Membership
The ability to create custom motion zones (Masking) is a premium feature. If it has suddenly stopped working, it's possible your subscription has lapsed.
- Check Subscription Status: Log in to your account at my.canary.is.
- Navigate to your account or membership settings.
- Verify that your Canary Premium Membership is active. If it has expired, the camera will revert to its default settings, which includes detecting motion across its entire field of view. You will need to renew your membership to re-enable the masking feature.
Step 3: Re-create Your Motion Zones (Masks)
Sometimes, the saved mask on Canary's servers can become corrupted or fail to apply correctly. Deleting and re-drawing your zones is the best way to fix this.
- Open the Canary app and select the camera you want to adjust.
- Tap the gear icon to go to 'Settings'.
- Select 'Masking' (this may be located under 'Motion notifications').
- If you have an existing mask, find the option to delete or clear it.
- Once cleared, carefully draw the new masks on the screen. Remember, with Canary, you are drawing over the areas you want the camera to IGNORE.
- Make sure you tap 'Save' to confirm the changes.
- Monitor the camera's activity. Walk into a masked area to test if the camera correctly ignores your movement, and then into an unmasked area to ensure it triggers an alert.
### Understanding Masking Limitations
It's also important to have realistic expectations of how motion masking works.
- Lighting Changes: The technology works by analysing changes in pixels. Therefore, sudden and dramatic changes in light, such as car headlights sweeping across a room or the sun coming out from behind a cloud, can sometimes be interpreted as motion, even within a masked zone.
- Reflections: Be mindful of reflections in windows or mirrors. Motion happening outside the camera's view could be reflected into an unmasked area, causing an unexpected trigger.
- Sensitivity Settings: In your camera's settings, you can also adjust the motion sensitivity. If you are still getting false alerts after setting up your masks, try slightly lowering the sensitivity to make the camera less reactive to minor changes.
By systematically working through these steps—updating, rebooting, checking your membership, and recreating your masks—you can resolve most issues with Canary's zone settings and once again take control of your motion alerts.