I have a myQ garage opener and installed the app for it and used Rule Machine to tell it to open when I’m approaching my house. It worked the first day, but then after stopped recognizing when my phone would leave or arrive and would even change status in the middle of the night causing the garage to randomly open.
Is there a better way to implement this? I know I could setup Homebridge to get it into HomeKit, but I don’t want to have another device to run that on when I already have HE. My car has CarPlay so it would be nice if I could get it to just pop up on my display through HomeKit, but isn’t necessary if I could at least just get the door opening on arrival to work.
On of the community users has manufactured a device specifically for this purpose:
As @thebearmay, the issue you are encountering is likely a presence issue - the app has some issues detecting presence sometimes. A lot of people use a presence combiner app for this purpose, and several presence detecting methods. I do the same and find that it works 95% of the time.
In my opinion, I think it is a terrible idea to use presence alone to trigger security devices like locks or garage doors. If the phone gets shut off or drops off wifi, you look like you are away. If like most modern phones they go into a low power mode, they shut off GPS and radios, and you look like you are not home.
But if you insist on doing this, I would look into one of the community based presence combiner apps. They take multiple devices and multiple methods (wifi + Hubitat app which used GPS, for example) and combine them to get a much better representation of if you are home or not.
I'm with @neonturbo on this one. I did this for awhile when I first got into home automation, but decided it really is not a good idea. I want automations to close and lock my house automatically if I forget, but I prefer to open it on my own.
As others have mentioned the HE presence is not very reliable. I use a combination of things. WIFI presence, HE presence and Alexa presence. This has worked pretty well for me.
Thank you for all of the feedback! If I were to avoid using presence alone, what would you recommend using instead? Is there any way to get the door into HomeKit without having to run homebridge on a separate device? I don’t want to have to pickup my phone to activate the garage, and I’ve seen that the HomeKit devices will prompt through CarPlay instead.
