Support / Staying informed / Alerts Search help
Alerts and notifications
Yardstick watches your robot for you and can report problems and optional job updates. You choose which problems matter and where the message goes, whether that is a banner on the page, a phone push, or your own email.
Alerts for real problems and optional job updates
Yardstick does not chatter at you. With the optional Jobs rules off, it stays quiet during normal mowing, charging and time on the dock. Problem messages report a robot that is stuck, lost, faulted or stranded, the kind of thing you would want to walk outside and check. Turn on Jobs rules for starts, mid-job charging and finishes.
The whole system rides on one master switch, Watch for problems and tell me. Turn that off and the robot works in silence. Leave it on, and every rule below that you have enabled is armed.
Two numbers you can tune
Most rules just work, but two of them lean on a number you get to set:
The alerts you can turn on
Each row is one rule. Turn on the ones you care about and leave the rest off. The colored tag shows how serious Yardstick considers it.
Where your alerts go
The Settings → Notifications panel picks the delivery channels. Each one is independent and optional, so turn on as many or as few as you like. The same alert can land in several places at once.
On this page
A banner right on the Yardstick page itself. To turn it on: flip the on-page toggle. Good if you keep the page open on a wall display or a spare screen.
Windows notification popup
A standard Windows toast in the corner of your screen. To turn it on: flip the Windows popup toggle. Windows only, and best effort, so it is useless while the PC is asleep.
Phone, through ntfy
A push to your phone using ntfy, which is free and needs no account. To turn it on: set a topic name (it starts with
yardstick-), then install the free ntfy app on your phone and subscribe to that same topic.Do not type the topic in by hand. A topic looks like
yardstick-413b5c52fe32c09b, and one wrong character subscribes you to a topic nobody sends to. Nothing warns you, because from the app’s point of view a topic with no messages and a topic that does not exist look identical. Press Show QR code next to the topic and point your phone camera at it instead. The code is drawn on your own computer, so your topic is never sent anywhere to be turned into a picture.Email
A message to yourself, sent through your own email account. To turn it on: enter your email server details and use Send a test to confirm it works. Nothing routes through Yardstick's servers.
Android, iPhone, a watch, a speaker: through Home Assistant
The four channels above are the ones in the Notifications panel. There is a fifth route that lives somewhere else and is worth knowing about, because it reaches things the others cannot.
If you already run Home Assistant, Yardstick can publish your robot into it as ordinary sensors. Once it is there, you write the notification in Home Assistant rather than in Yardstick, which means it can go anywhere Home Assistant can already send: the companion app on Android or iPhone, a watch, a speaker that announces it out loud, a light that changes color, or all of them at once. You also get to decide the wording and the conditions yourself.
This is the answer if you are on Android and would rather not add another app, or if you want an alert to do something more interesting than appear on a screen. Setting it up is on the Home Assistant page, with a worked example you can paste in.
It is not a replacement for the four above. It needs Home Assistant already running, and if you do not have that, ntfy is far less work.
The one rule that acts: Stop the robot if it leaves the map
Every rule above only watches and tells you. This one is different. Stop the robot if it leaves the map is the single rule that does something to the robot itself, and it ships off by default.
When it is on and the robot travels about 5 feet past its mapped edge, Yardstick sends a stop command. The robot then sits where it is until you go restart it. Think of it as a last-resort backstop for the rare case where everything else has failed, not as a boundary you can count on.
- It checks the robot's position only about every 20 seconds, so at speed it can be roughly 10 meters late.
- It works only when the robot has a fixed RTK position. No fixed position, no check.
- The stop is a network message. Like any message, it can fail to arrive.
- It does nothing while the computer is asleep.
- It has never been tested against a real machine in the runaway situation it exists for.
Common questions
Will I get pestered with alerts all day?
Choose the rules you want. Problem alerts report trouble; optional Job started, Went back to charge mid-job and Job finished report normal activity and start off. If you want fewer, turn off individual rules you do not care about.
Do I have to pick just one delivery channel?
No. The four channels are independent. You can send the same alert to the on-page banner, a Windows popup, your phone, and your email all at once, or use only one. Turn on whatever fits how you watch your yard.
Why does email need an app password?
Some providers require a separate app password for SMTP. Others require a sign-in method Yardstick does not offer. The full walkthrough is in setting up email alerts.
Can the "Stop the robot" rule truly keep the robot in the yard?
Treat it as a last resort, not a guarantee. It checks position only about every 20 seconds, needs a fixed RTK position, relies on a network message that can fail, and does nothing while the PC sleeps. It has never been exercised against a real machine in the situation it is for. Keep it off unless you understand those limits, and never treat it as a fence.
Not seeing an alert you expected, or getting one you cannot explain? Open a support ticket and tell us which rule and which channel. Because Yardstick runs on your own machine, we can usually point you to the exact setting.