dmd docs
SOS & Alarm
Two things the head unit does while you are not looking at it: call for help if you crash, and make a noise if someone touches the bike while it is parked. If the bike is taken anyway, you can follow it on a map from your phone, silence or sound the alarm from there, and lock the head unit so it is worth nothing to whoever has it.
The Home Screen
Two cards, two switches, and a banner across the top that tells you in one glance whether anything is actually watching. Everything else is one tap away behind Settings › on each card.
| Banner | What It Means |
|---|---|
| NOT ARMED | Nothing is watching — either both switches are off, or something is missing (no emergency contact, no calibration). The banner says which, and offers the button that fixes it. |
| STANDBY | Set up correctly and waiting for the conditions it needs — usually waiting to be connected to the bike. |
| ARMED | Watching right now. |
Crash SOS
Crash SOS watches the accelerometer, the gyroscope and your GPS speed while you ride. When it sees an impact it gives you a minute to say you are fine; if you do not, it texts your emergency contacts with a map link to where you are.
Vehicle chooses the model. Motorcycle watches for the bike going over; Car does not, and waits longer before it decides.
Sensitivity is the terrain you ride. Road reacts to the lightest impacts; Adventure, the default, ignores potholes and hard stops; Enduro needs a harder hit or the bike on its side before it asks. The level shows on the Crash SOS card.
Emergency contacts take one or two numbers. Enter them the way you would dial them from abroad, with the country code.
Turn Send SMS on crash off and the alert still appears on screen — nothing is sent.
What has to be true before it can trigger
Crash SOS only watches while all of these hold:
- The switch is on, and there is at least one emergency contact
- The head unit is connected to the bike — in its holder, or on the M9 cable
- The screen is on
- The zero position has been calibrated
- You are moving, and have covered at least 15 m (motorcycle) or 50 m (car) since setting off
- The vehicle has moved within the last minute, whenever there is a GPS fix to say so
The last two are what stop a bike being wheeled around a garage, or a head unit being knocked and lifted out of its holder at a fuel stop, from calling your family. A crash starts with the bike in motion, so one that has been standing still for a minute is being handled, not crashed. With no fix at all — a garage, a tunnel, a cold receiver — that cannot be known, and detection stays exactly as sensitive as it always was. Until all of it is true the banner reads STANDBY, and the Diagnostics screen shows you which line is not yet met.
Motorcycle
- Impact: a sustained hit, measured over a tenth of a second — a pothole or a rock step is too brief to count
- Lean: the bike on its side, measured only while it is not braking or bouncing
- Slow tip-over: catches gradual falls in mud, sand or gravel with no impact at all, for as long as you were riding shortly before
- A stop on its own is not a crash: after an impact the bike has to end up leaning too, unless the hit was severe
- A shake on its own is not a crash either: however hard the knock and however far it spins, the bike has to finish somewhere other than upright
- Distance: 15 metres · Confirmation: 5 seconds
Car
- No tilt check: cars stay upright in most crashes
- Calm check: the sensors must settle for 3 seconds after the impact
- Distance: 50 metres
- Confirmation: 8 seconds — a longer window to cancel
Calibration
Calibration teaches the app what upright looks like on your bike, with the head unit at your mounting angle. Every lean and impact is measured against it, so Crash SOS will not engage until it is done.
How to calibrate
- Mount the head unit exactly as you ride with it — in the holder, on the bike
- Park on flat, level ground. Not on a slope, and upright rather than leaning on the side stand if you can manage it
- Hold still
- Open SOS & Alarm › Crash SOS › Settings and tap CALIBRATE
- The Calibrated chip on the home card turns green
What Happens In A Crash
A hard enough impact, together with tilt, rotation or a sudden drop in speed. The app waits 5–8 seconds to be sure.
A full-screen Fall Detected! alert with a 60-second countdown, and a loud alarm so someone nearby notices too.
Tap Cancel and nothing is sent; the app then asks one question, Did you fall? — see Helping It Improve. Tap Send Now, or let the countdown run out, and it goes.
Your message plus a Google Maps link to your position, by SMS, to both numbers. In an active riding group your status also becomes “Help Me” on everyone's map.
Once the message is away, this button silences the alarm. A two-minute cooldown stops the same crash alerting twice.
Helping It Improve
Off-road riders drop the bike often and are fine, so pressing Cancel on the countdown does not tell the app whether it was right. What does is you: after a cancelled countdown the head unit asks Did you fall? with two answers, Yes, I fell and No, false alarm. If the SOS went out instead, the question waits on the app's home screen for the next time you open it. Answer honestly — a minor drop you cancelled is exactly the kind of fall it must keep catching.
Share fall data with DMD
On by default, in Crash SOS › Settings › Fall data. With it on, each answered event is sent to DMD together with the sensor readings from the 30 seconds before and 15 seconds after: accelerometer, gyroscope and GPS speed. Your position is not included, and no account is needed. The recordings are replayed against every change to the detector, so a tuning that would have missed your fall or fired on your descent does not ship.
Report a missed fall
Dropped the bike and nothing happened? Press REPORT A MISSED FALL in the same settings within a few minutes. The last three minutes of sensor data are saved as a missed fall and sent. It is the only way we can ever learn the detector was too quiet.
Theft Alarm
The theft alarm is the parked half of the app. It watches for the bike being moved while you are away from it, and it is deliberately narrow about when it watches, because an alarm that goes off in your garage at 3 a.m. is an alarm you will switch off.
It watches only while all of this is true
- The Theft Alarm switch is on
- The head unit is connected to the bike — in the holder, or on the M9 cable
- The screen is off
In other words: it arms itself when you park and walk away, and disarms itself the moment you wake the screen. There is nothing to remember to switch on. The card on the home screen says Ready when it is set up and waiting, and Armed while it is actually watching.
Sound the siren is the noise itself, through the head unit's speaker.
Send an SMS texts your alert number the message below it, with a map link. While the alarm keeps being re-triggered it repeats at most once a minute.
Chirp when arming gives you two beeps when it starts watching and one when it stops — the confirmation a car alarm gives you as you walk away.
Stopping The Alarm
When the alarm goes off the head unit wakes its own screen and puts the alert in front of whatever was there, so there is always something to press. It also tells you how long it has been sounding, which is usually the first thing you want to know when you get back to the bike.
Once it is sounding, none of this depends on the bike any more. Unplugging the unit does not silence it, and neither does a restart while it is reported stolen. The same is true in the other direction: Sound the alarm and Report stolen from your phone work whether or not the unit is still in its holder.
There are three ways to silence it:
- On the head unit — tap Stop Alarm
- From your phone over Bluetooth — DMD Phone Link, no signal needed at either end
- From anywhere — the DMD HUB app on your iPhone
Asking for a PIN first
By default a tap is enough, on the theory that the person standing at the bike with the alarm screaming is usually you. If you would rather it were harder than that, turn on Require PIN to stop the alarm and choose a four-digit PIN.
Wrong PINs are rate-limited: the pad locks for fifteen seconds after a run of bad attempts, and the wait doubles each time, up to fifteen minutes. That is enough to make guessing pointless without ever locking you out permanently — the wait always ends.
From Your Phone
Everything above happens on the head unit alone, with no account and no internet. Once you connect the head unit to your DMD HUB account, the alarm also reaches your phone — and your phone can answer back.
Connecting it to your account
Sign in to your DMD HUB account in the DMD2 app on the head unit. SOS & Alarm picks the account up from there by itself — there is nothing to sign in to twice, and no separate password to keep. Sign out of DMD2 and the head unit stops reporting.
DMD HUB on iPhone
Open the Account tab and tap Vehicle Security. A theft alert also arrives as a push notification that breaks through Sleep Focus, and tapping it opens this screen directly.
| From your phone | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Follow it on a map | The last position the head unit reported. While the alarm is sounding, or the unit is locked, it reports every few seconds; the rest of the time about once a minute, to spare the battery. |
| Sound the alarm | Starts the siren on demand — for finding the bike in a car park as much as for scaring anyone off. |
| Stop the alarm | Silences it without walking to the bike. |
| Report stolen | Locks the head unit — see the next section. |
| Remove stolen state | Ends it, from the same screen: the unit unlocks, the stolen screen comes down, the touchscreen works again and it stops being tracked. |
| Lock / Unlock the screen | Hands the touchscreen back without giving up the lock — for a unit you have found but not yet reached. |
DMD Phone Link on Android
Phone Link carries the same alerts straight over Bluetooth, which matters because the case you are most likely to meet is the everyday one: you are thirty metres away, in a café basement or a ferry deck, with no signal at either end. That link is up; the internet is not.
Open DMD Phone Link and tap Vehicle security, under Your bike. It reads Bluetooth only until you sign in to DMD HUB on that screen, and HUB connected afterwards.
Stop alarm and Sound alarm work over Bluetooth alone. Signing in to your DMD HUB account on the same screen adds the rest — the map, and locking the unit — for when the bike is further away than Bluetooth reaches.
Locking A Stolen Device
Report stolen is the last resort, and it is meant to be. It turns the head unit into something that is no use to whoever has it, keeps reporting where it is, and tells anyone who looks at it how to give it back.
It stays locked
The screen cannot be dismissed, stays awake, and the unit's own buttons stop doing anything. Pulling the power does not help: the lock is written where it survives a reboot, and comes straight back the moment the device starts — before anyone has unlocked Android.
It keeps talking
For as long as it has power and a connection it keeps reporting its position, every few seconds, and your phone keeps drawing the trail. Every restart is reported too, so a unit that is switched off and on again tells you exactly that.
Two ways back
- Your PIN, on the device. Tap Owner unlock and enter it. This works with no signal at all — and if the touchscreen is the problem, the handlebar remote drives the keypad too.
- Remove the stolen state from your phone. The same screen you locked it from, in either app. If the unit is offline it is queued and applied the next time it reports. This is the path that does not need the PIN.
Testing It Before You Need It
A theft feature you have never tried is a theft feature you do not know you have. The app has a self-test that shows the locked screen exactly as it would appear for real, so you can see it, and then check that your PIN releases it.
- Set a PIN in Theft Alarm › Settings › Security
- Open Diagnostics and scroll to Self test
- Tap TEST STOLEN SCREEN
- Release it with Owner unlock and your PIN
Without a PIN the button refuses and sends you to set one first — on purpose.
The same is worth doing for the alarm itself: Sound alarm on the home screen triggers it exactly as a real one, so you can confirm the siren, the text message and the alert on your phone all arrive.
Diagnostics
When the banner says STANDBY and you expected ARMED, this screen tells you which line is not met. It is also the fastest way to check a mount is calibrated and the GPS is alive before a long ride.
| Row | What It Tells You |
|---|---|
| Connected to bike | The head unit is in its holder or on the M9 cable. Nothing arms while this is No. |
| Zero position set | Calibration has been done. |
| Motion detected | The accelerometer sees you moving. |
| Moved minimum distance | You have covered the 15 m / 50 m since setting off. |
| Impulse · Lean · Rotation | Live reading against the threshold for the sensitivity you have chosen. Impulse is gravity-free, so a unit at rest reads near zero; Lean shows (moving) while the bike is braking or bouncing and its angle is not being trusted. |
| GPS speed | Current speed, or stale when there has been no fix recently — normal indoors. |
| Fall pending | A possible crash is being confirmed right now. |
What Leaves The Device
- With no HUB account signed in, nothing leaves the head unit at all. Crash SOS and the theft alarm both work fully offline; the only thing they send is your own SMS to your own contacts.
- With an account signed in, the unit reports its position, battery and alarm state to your DMD HUB account — and only to yours. It is the same account that already carries your riding groups.
- Position is reported often while something is happening (alarm sounding, unit locked) and sparingly the rest of the time.
- Signing out of DMD2 on the head unit stops all of it.
- Separately, and with or without an account, Share fall data with DMD sends the sensor readings around a crash-detection event you have answered for — speed included, position never. Switch it off in Crash SOS › Settings › Fall data and nothing about falls leaves the unit.
Troubleshooting
Open Diagnostics and read down the list — one of these is No:
- Connected to bike: seat the unit properly in the holder, or check the M9 cable.
- Zero position set: calibrate, stationary and on the bike.
- Motion detected: you have to actually be moving.
- Moved minimum distance: 15 m for a motorcycle, 50 m for a car, from where you set off.
- Screen: Crash SOS needs the screen on. The theft alarm is the opposite — it needs it off.
- Tap Stop Alarm on the head unit, or stop it from your phone.
- The alarm only watches while the unit is connected to the bike and the screen is off. If it is triggering where you park — a windy spot, a busy street, a ferry deck — switch it off for that stop, or turn off Sound the siren and keep the alert on your phone only.
- The arming chirp is the confirmation that it started watching; if you never hear it, it never armed.
- Press Cancel within the 60 seconds and nothing is sent. Then answer No, false alarm — that answer is what improves it.
- Move Sensitivity up a level: Adventure for mixed riding, Enduro for rock steps and big hits. The app suggests this itself after three false alarms in a month.
- Recalibrate — on the bike, level ground, holding still. A bad zero position corrects itself while riding, but a fresh one is quicker.
- An alert while the bike was parked and you were handling the head unit should no longer happen: detection needs the vehicle to have moved in the last minute.
- A two-minute cooldown after each event prevents duplicate alerts from one incident.
- Check Send SMS on crash (or Send an SMS for the alarm) is on.
- Enter numbers with the country code, as you would dial them from abroad.
- The head unit needs a SIM with SMS credit — a data-only plan cannot send text messages.
- Check the SMS permission has been granted to the app.
- The head unit has to be signed in to the same DMD HUB account — check DMD2 › HUB on the unit, not the SOS app.
- A unit appears the first time it reports something. Trigger it once with Sound alarm on the head unit's home screen.
- The unit needs a data connection to report. With no SIM and no Wi-Fi it still alarms locally and still reaches Phone Link over Bluetooth — it just cannot be tracked.