The 3am alarm nobody logged: building incident accountability for shops
Description and use
The system consolidates alarm events, video clips, closure details, and timestamps into a single record, simplifying audit processes in supermarkets.
Problem
Shop incident logs lack a single source of truth for alarm events, who closed them, and when, leading to inconsistent records and audit gaps.
Outcome
The system creates a single incident record with video clip, timestamp, closure person, and a one-line summary, enabling audit-ready reports without external cloud dependencies.
Workflow
- Initialize incident database
- Trigger alarm event with camera and reason
- Cut video clip of the event
- Record alarm fire time
- Record who closed the alarm and when
- Generate one-line summary
- Store clip and metadata locally
- Generate incident report
- Handle model timeouts and fallbacks
Evidence
The alarm goes off at 3am. By the morning, three people can tell you three different things about what happened, and none of them can show you.
An incident accountability system. It makes those three facts one row in a database.
The whole thing is a SQLite file and a folder of clips on the store's own machine.
The summary line is generated by an open-weight model running locally through Ollama — qwen2.5-coder:7b, Apache 2.0, 4.7 GB, on the box in the back office.
- Record date: 2026-10-17T04:56:10.268Z