Its good for arriving, but not for departing because at least with my Ford & Sync3, WiFi disconnects about 5-10 minutes after I turn the ignition off.
That gets (undesirably) interpreted as a departure event.
Arriving would be what I’m after to pull up to garage and have it open and turn on lights at night
For the departing: I’ve got some mad scientist levels of Rule Machine kicking around in my head lol
I bought some Iris 3450-L2 (second gen) fobs. From my testing, they are less reliable for presence than the SmartThings arrival sensor I'm using:
Several people have reported issues with the SmartThings arrival sensor, but mine has been very reliable with 2 caveats:
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The mesh needs to be solid. To increase the reliability and allow other Zigbee devices away from the house, I've going to extend my mesh with one or more repeaters outside. The only time I've had issues to date is when I had other problems with my mesh or....
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The battery contacts on the arrival sensor are "fiddly". Care must be taken not to bend them where they don't hold the battery firmly. So attention needs to be given when swapping the battery out. If the battery is low or not making good contact, you will have problems with the arrival sensor.
I will probably retest the Iris fobs again once I put Zigbee repeaters outside. The initial tests may have been influenced by other Zigbee mesh issues.
Having been a long time Iris user, I would not recommend the Iris fobs. I fought with them for years because Iris did not have a geofencing function. They can take up to 2 minutes to notify the hub that you are home unless Hubitat has changed the ping rate. On Iris it was every 2 minutes. That doesn't sound like it is that long unless you are standing by the front door waiting for your lock to unlock and your alarm to be turned off.
What has been rock solid for me on both SmartThings and Hubitat is Life360. I have not had it fail since I have been using it which is one year now. It is way more reliable (for me anyway) than any built in geofencing function that I have tried including Nest, Blue Iris and SmartThings. I did not even consider the Hubitat built in function because I have Life360 installed on all family members phones, even if they don't live with us, so that certain functions happen when they visit. That way they do not have access to Hubitat and do not need the Hubitat app on their phone.
99% of the time, the alarm has turned off by the time I reach the front door. If the warning tones start to sound, I can just hit the disarm button on the fob. For me, the Iris fobs (which I already had) beat going out and purchasing another device to gain that last 1%.
Life360 looks like it is an app that could share family locations, not just with family members, but who knows where else (e.g. China) the location data is being sent? I prefer the Iris Smart Fobs or other local devices that don't require Internet sharing of location data.
I found an article which contains this:
The company may say its mission is to help families, but it’s also a business—one that is trying to grow. Life360 quietly went public on the Australian Securities Exchange in May. Its prospectus claims that the company has “amassed one of the world’s largest digital audiences of security-conscious family units" and has "deep insights into these Users in a way that was not possible before the smartphone. We know where our Users live, work, shop, drive and more.”
And the company is using that data to, well, sell car insurance. According to the company’s privacy policy, it shares your “personal information, driving event data, and other information,” with the risk-assessment firm Arity, which uses that information to calculate insurance pricing and “develop risk-predictive models for its own analytics purposes.” Arity is a subsidiary of the insurance giant Allstate, which is also an investor in Life360. In its prospectus earlier this year, Life360 said it hopes to soon offer US customers Allstate insurance plans that are customized based on how they drive. And why stop at cars? The company woos potential investors with grand plans of one day disrupting areas like general insurance, home security, elder care, and more. When Life360 detects you’ve moved, for instance, it could offer to sell you new surveillance cameras.
Life360 is not something I want.
I agree completely. I bought the Hubitat for local control. My goal is to eventually have my smart home 100% local other than maybe the Hubitat app (primarily for notifications). The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for yet is a local and reliable voice control to replace the Amazon Echos.
I'd prefer the fobs as well, but (for me anyways) they don't work for nuthin'. Completely useless when it takes 2-5 minutes to decide "hey, you're home"
One advantage to using a mobile phone as a presence device is that the geofence can be far larger than what could be done with a zigbee device. For example if you want a thermostat setpoint to change when you’re still several miles from home.
Or you can create automations based on arrival/departure from locations other than where your hub is. For example when you leave work.
There are several geolocation apps that aren’t nearly as invasive as Life360 (according to their privacy policies at least).
I have a SmartThings presence sensor which is quite reliable but the battery doesn't last long and when it fails it's extremely fiddly to replace and get a good connection. I resorted to wrapping electrical tape right around the battery insitu, which works really good but now upon replacing again leads to a sticky mess. I have an Iris 4 button fob, 2nd hand shipped all the way from the USA as quite high cost - and it's utter junk. Drops off the mesh or needs multiple button pushes to respond, and the battery seat is even worse than the Samsung. So in the end I went for a combined Presence approach using (1) wifi connection app (fixed IP, utterly reliable), (2) life 360 (quite reliable for us) and (3) Hubitat app (quite reliable). I simply use RM to build our Combined Presence based on a recipe/combo of these that works for us. If everyone is out then the switch on the right turns on and controls alarm, lights and AC off/on etc. On the left I put our Withings sleep pads. It makes for quite a nice presence dashboard.
You can see in this example here that Life360 has failed to update for me but because the other 2 are validated then it knows I'm home. Then the wife is below, and finally at the bottom a guest can use the Iris fob (which as I said doesn't work well at all anyway). I have some buttons for Life360 refresh, property rental mode etc.
Hope it gives you some ideas!
Strange that the Iris Smart Fob is not working reliably. Ours have been fantastic. Both my wife and I have them and except when the battery has run low, have been very reliable. Have you tried a fresh battery in the Smart Fob?
I know what you mean about the battery seat. The side terminal for the positive can break off. I had to re-solder and glue one of them. I have one that I purchased that is unusable because it came without the side battery terminal. I am waiting for one of the ones we are using to die so I can transfer the terminal to that one and put it to use.
Hi, please can I ask you how you do the Life360 refresh (is it in RM4) if so, please show me your rule you are using, would really appreciate it.
Thank you
I did this to 3 of mine. Works great! One in each vehicle. Not hard to do.
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Sure, can't quite remember to be honest. But I have a device set up like this...
And then I just selected the option in the dashboard, like this...
It works well. I clicked it earlier and it set my presence properly to home. Normally don't need to do it, but sometimes Life360 skips a beat. Hence the need for a Combined Presence approach.
And here's my Combined Presence rule, in case it helps or provides some inspiration 
This combination seems to be 100% reliable for me.
And here finally is my 'Everyone is out' routine...to set a virtual switch (I don't use a mode for Away... I prefer to keep Modes for time-based management (Day, Evening, Night) and Virtual switches for if we are in bed or out etc.). It is much easier in my opinion than muddling up status with time.
Once this switch is set or unset, that control lights, HSM arm/disarm, AC etc. in other rules.
I use Guest Mode (another Virtual Switch, not actually a mode) if we have guests staying with us (and give them the Iris fob) and I also have a setting for if we rent the place on Airbnb (so that our presence doesn't then control stuff).
Thank you, I am trying to work out how to create that Refresh app, I tried with a virtual device, using the Application Refresh Button driver, but it keeps saying
2020-04-11 18:48:12.874 infoParent app not found!, install this driver as a child device from an application, after which the commands push() and refresh() will call parent.refresh()
Not sure where to create this child device?
Yeah seen that. But the idea is to give the key fob to guests (who may not have a car and prefer a small device). I agree that's a good solution for a car and especially the home owner. But to be honest I don't really see the point because I have a phone in my pocket that's always charged (particularly if I'm arriving by car) and will connect to the home wifi about as quick as the Smartthings presence sensor will connect to my zigbee mesh. So I think the mobile WiFi presence is a really good approach along with Life360/Hubitat and a presence sensor maybe as an additional backup. Multi-faceted Combined Presence is definitely the most robust way to set up reliable presence sensing.
I found that the battery drain on our Iphones using the HE app presence was horrible and was not very reliable as well. Since going to this method and turning off location on HE app it now uses about 1% battery running all the time. Before it was the batteries worst offender. Also this method has been 100% reliable.
This is an interesting idea. I suspect the same thing could be done with an Iris 1st gen Keyfob or a 2nd gen Smart Fob. However, since we only have one vehicle and since I often am out while my wife is at home, it would not necessarily work for us. I really like the idea of less expensive batteries that last longer. It could possibly be adapted for use with contact sensors or buttons where appearance is not a big factor.
