I have not tried that but i will try that now
Ok i have hope that fixed it. I canât get out of bed today so far though so it will be a while before i can test this. But i had to redo the routine and now under events it isnât blank anymore
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Hopefully thatâs an encouraging sign.
Using mobile phones as presence sensors can be tricky (regardless of which exact app youâre using).
If you have some time on your hands, you might find this thread to be helpful:
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Thank i just read that. Looks like something i will try. I didnât see a way to use alexa as a presence sensor. Though i thought there would be a way
Door did not unlock, and nothing new in the events on my iPhone device events tab. Just the event it added when i logged in with it earlier.
Did your presence change to Away when you were out? And then switch back to Home when you got back in the geofence?
There's no use thinking about the lock part until you've verified that the presence detection itself is working reasonably reliably.
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I honestly didnât think to check, i just noticed when i walked up to the door and it was locked
Ok i am out, and my geofencing on the hubitat says i am away. I can not connect to the hub though to show my devices and see if they say present or not
Viewing devices via the Rooms feature and Dashboards is included with app access - that doesn't require any add'l subscriptions or costs. You just need to build a dashboard with the devices you want to review.
I have my locks and presence indicators on a dashboard so I can easily view those statuses whether I'm on or off my own (home) network.
What do the logs say for your presence and the lock when you arrive? You can temporarily enable additional logging in the lock rule too - that can help give additional info about what's happening. Is it possible that you're not getting to your lock w/in 5 minutes of your (programatic) arrival and so the lock is already re-locked?
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Do you mean the Hubitat app on your phone? Or the phone device on your Hubitat hub?
In the hubitat app on my phone the geofencing says away. I do have a dashboard set up donât have my phone virtual presence on it though
I added the phone to the dashboard. It says present though.
I just added the new lock in 5 mins feature, but the logs for the lock are empty. Well that isnât true it shows that it was unlocked with the keypad but not the rule like it used to do.
I think it needs to refresh presence, but canât figure out how to make it do it. I manually hit the life360 refresh and it changed my status to not presence for both my life 360 sensor and my built in hubitat presence sensor for my phone app
If the virtual device corresponding to your phone is working as intended, you should see events populate here as you come and go.
I am on my way back home so i will know in an hour. I went ahead and purchased a month of the remote service just so i can try more things while i am away if it doesnât work today. I might just end up just buying a year of the service anyway. I am also trying to decide what apple device to buy. I donât think i would use the apple tv, and i donât want to spend so much on the homepod as i doubt i would use it much. But i was thinking about buying the echo studio, so maybe the homepod would be worth it. I know i can get the refurbished minis a lot cheaper, but then the only thing that would do is provide the presence detection. With the larger one i would get decent sounding music too.
Ok i am home. Door did not unlock, hubitat presence still says not present. If i go click on the life 360 refresh it will show phone is present then unlock the door
My recommendation is that you first solve for the best presence-sensing solution that works for you - it sounds like you still have L360 in the mix as well as the HE app geofence. If L360 is still working for you, that's great, but I'd get a backup plan ready.
Part of that solution is setting up a virtual presence device that's tied to your desired presence solution - that device can then be leveraged in a dashboard for easy reference and used in rules related to arrivals/departures. You do not need HE's (extra) Remote Admin feature to do any of that.
Right now, it sounds like your virtual presence device is still tied to L360 -- that's fine if that's what works, but if you go a different direction from L360, that needs to be addressed.
Worry about the lock rule last -- thinking about that is just wasted time until you get a working presence-sensing solution nailed down.
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Thanks. I actually just added life360 back in the mix last night around midnight as a backup. Was hoping if one didnât work the other would. I would prefer to do away with life360 all together and just use the built in through the app. It still wont detect i am home. I think i have to log out and back in, then it will detect i have arrived. I set a 1 min refresh in RM for life360 right now so it refreshes every min 24 hours per day. This doesnât seem like a good solution though. Any idea why the built in wont work correctly? It shows i am home under the geofencing, but i have to log out and back in for the presence to change
I didnât log out, but i did have to toggle geofencing off and back on. When i did the door unlocked and the presence changed to present
I may have missed this somewhere above, but did you try the [UPDATED] iPhone WiFi Presence Sensor app? It works fairly well in my opinion. This plus the [RELEASE] Combined Presence app suggested above work well to determine presence.
I donât think i have tried that yet. I will look into it. Just a update, i left for an hour and came back. While i was gone both the builtin app sensor and the life360 sensor showed i was not present. I had the dashboard open and as i drove down the street to my house one turned green. I was expecting it to be the life360 one since that is supposed to be refreshing every min. Nope it was the built in one from the app. The door finally unlocked correctly. Maybe turning off geofencing then turning it back on worked? That is the only thing different this time from last time i came home
I still have not gotten this to work. I bought a homepod, and tried following the tutorials on here but have not been able to follow any of them. Looks like some things have changed and some options are not there. I made the automations in apple shortcuts but it does nothing when i test it. I have been working on this for about 3 hours today and am so pissed off right now i am about to just leave the house unlocked 24/7 and say screw it. Not like someone canât just break the glass right beside my door and unlock it if they are gonna break inside
