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The two-tier flock

Sentinel’s hardware model is “shepherd and flock”: The app never pretends to have per-animal GPS: the map shows sentinel positions (exact) and ear-tag presence (approximate, via which sentinel last heard the tag).

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Organisation, farm, fields

  • Your organisation is the account everything hangs off — members, farms, animals and billing. You create or join one the first time you sign in.
  • A farm is the operational unit: it has an MQTT topic slug (flock/<slug>/…), a timezone, a property boundary, and fields (paddocks, exclusion zones, yards). The active farm is chosen with the switcher at the top of the sidebar.
  • The boundary is the ground truth for geofencing: with the geofence armed, a sentinel reporting from outside it raises a geofence alert.

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Animals, devices, breeds

Devices self-register on their first MQTT message and wait as unassigned until an Admin claims them for a farm. Each device can be linked to an animal in the flock register, and each animal to a breed — breed matters because it materially changes how sheep read on 3-axis accelerometry, so per-breed settings tune translation and cast-detection. Tag profiles do the same per hardware batch or firmware.

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Alerts and episodes

The ingest raises alerts of six kinds: Repeats of the same event within the episode window (configurable, default 1 hour) join one alert as extra occurrences instead of flooding the list. An alert moves open → acknowledged → resolved, and resolving records an outcome — ewe righted, animal recovered, false alarm, animal lost, or other — so welfare reporting reflects what actually happened on the hill.

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Roles

Sentinel uses the organisation’s two roles:
  • Member — monitor everything, acknowledge and resolve alerts, fly and abort drone missions, download media. Read-only on configuration.
  • Admin — everything a Member can do, plus farms and boundaries, the flock register, device claiming, breeds and tag profiles, ingest and simulator control, alert rules, members and billing. Admin-only pages (Farms, Settings) only appear in the sidebar for Admins.

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Plan features

What your organisation’s plan includes decides which parts of the app are switched on: Admins can see and change the plan under Settings → Billing.