Guard Mutt WS free

Turn an old Android phone into a security monitoring device for boats, caravans etc. You can see the status of the electricity mains, location of your boat, and even remotely take a picture using this app.

If you provide an email (not mandatory) you will be notified if the electricity mains supply fails or of your boat (or caravan) moves more than a preset distance.

This is the old Guard Mutt app but re-written to communicate by a website rather than by email. It now does the job properly.

PLEASE NOTE

I seem to have been somewhat undone by my success here. I have moved the Guard Mutt Website from a free hoster to a paid account. I hope that this will no longer result in the account being blocked for exceeding its CPU quota. I wasn't expecting so many hits.

I wrote this app out of a need I had to remotely monitor the status of my boat. At the time of writing could find nothing that gave me the following features in a single app. Having used it with just me and a few friends, I have opened it up to the public at large. Let me know how you get on with it. Like most of my apps, it appears crude but functional and there is more than meets the eye under the hood. And no adverts!

• Remotely monitor the status of the mains electricity supply (to fully drain the fresh water system is a real pain so I leave some low powered tubular heaters in strategic places). The app allows me to query the status of the mains electricity whenever I want.

• Remotely monitor the position of the boat.

• Remotely take a picture from your boat (if your Android device has a camera) using either the front or rear facing camera (if your device has both).

• Internet access from the phone that you leave on the boat is required, and you need to register with the Guard Mutt Website

What this application is not

This app is a security app, it is not a snooping app. I have designed it to be as difficult as possible to use the app for snooping (e.g. hiding a phone in somebody's bedroom), particularly regarding the feature that allows a picture to be remotely taken.

If you want to use the remote photo feature you must:

• Set the app up correctly on the target device (that has to be done for any feature to work)

• The app must be left running in the foreground

• A charger must be connected to the target device (leaving the app running in the foreground with the app running would flatten the device's battery in a short while anyway). There is a deliberate latency between sending a request for a photo and the picture actually being taken, so you can never capture an exact moment.