Geofence has no red dot

📱 Mobile Apps Android App
21

Here's another data point for you. I have the app (same version and build) on my tablet. It rarely leaves the breakfast table so geofence was turned off on that app. When i opened the app, it did still have the correct lat and lon of the original geofence still listed. I turned geo fence back on and i have the red pin and can adjust the settings just fine. Tablet is a Samsung SM-T510 running android 11.

Then I deleted the cache and app data on the tablet. Reopened app and logged back in. The Geofence had me initially at 0.0/0.0 as well. The debug log showed that the app was complaining that location services were not set to high accuracy though and that was the reason Geofence wasn't available. The log told me to go to settings and change accuracy to high. There really was no such setting ing the tablet. Location services were on and i made sure all settings were high. Closing and reopening the app didn't help much. I opened a couple map apps and a gps app to make sure the tablet new where it was located. After the third app, Hubitat finally showed the Geofence red pin at my location.

The tablet debug log shows "initial location set up" followed by "restart" "initial set up" then my gps position then "ENTER: posting successful, source: initial location set up" then "ENTER: posting successful, source: initial set up."

I went back to my phone and tried similar things. I turned location on, off, high, and low accuracy. I opened and closed the app, deleted cache and data, and any other combination i could think of. Nothing brought my red pin back. My phone gps debug log shows many entries with "initial location set up" along with many entries for my gps location. But no other entries that the tablet shows.

So my tablet and my hub (C7) get along, but not the phone. When i delete cache and data in the app and lug back in, the devices are always known since they are in my devices list. So the app lets me pick them from a list. The knowledge of the phone in the device list is the only connection that i don't reset in my attempts.

I hope some of this may help.

Chuck

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22

Just popping on to add a question. I will preface this with the fact that I am aware that some have hubs at different locations. However, it would seem like we should be able to set a default hub and default home location for initial setup. (Edited to add - I am talking about initial setup for the phone app based on the location details in a default or singular hub)

For some strange reason, I have been logged out of the app twice in the last month. BOTH times I was a good distance away from my home location. BOTH times, it set my "home" location to where I was when I logged back in, and IMMEDIATELY marked me as home.

If we cannot set a default hub and/or location, would it at least be possible to allow the user to search by address to at least get within 50 miles of the location they want? Or, would it be possible that it would save the location for a particular phone (maybe in the device settings) so that when you log back in, it just resumes with the same information?

@bobbyD

23

Thanks for your feedback. Saving the location coordinates goes against our privacy policy. However, the search functionaly is already there. Pressing the target in the upper right hand corner (marker 1 in below picture) should point to the current location (blue marker #2 in below pucture). Then you can drag the pin (red marker #3) to your current location.

Screenshot_20220712-113538_Hubitat
Screenshot_20220712-113538_Hubitat1080×1132 384 KB

1 Like
24

This is expected behavior, unless the app crashed, or app data on the phone has been deleted. We are constantly improving the geofence experience and the next update will further address app crashes. I don't know when the next update might be released, but I can assure you that bug fixes are coming :wink:

25

Thanks for replying.

You do not need to press the button to make your current location the home location. It is actually doing this by default AND setting the location to home (thus disarming my away mode). In both my instances this was NOT the desired behavior.

Dragging the icon 400 miles once was a pain for initial setup. Back then, it defaulted to some place in the middle of the US. However, this occurring multiple times because I get logged out due to lack of cell signal is actually becoming unbearable.

What I am talking about (in absence of allowing the device on HE to store a default location as a device attribute - which shouldn't cause any more of a privacy issue than presence itself does) is preventing ANY automatic creation of a home location until the user determines where it should be. AND, allowing you to type in an address to get the marker close to where you want it. That second part is the "search function" I was asking if it was even possible. So, if I am in Gatlinburg, TN, and I get logged out for whatever reason, I would be able to type my home address in southern Maryland instead of having to do a multi-step pinch zoom to put my home location back to where it should be (and hopefully before it marks me home).

Again, both times I have been logged out, I was 400 miles or more from home.

To your point about privacy, my suggestion was that maybe the presence device itself is modified to allow a home location attribute tied to the hub it is added to. I would think that could be a local variable that has a default that it gets from the hub itself. So, in the creation of the device, it defaults the flag to that variable it gets from the hub it is being created on. That should be no more intrusive than the device itself knowing it is present or not. Just a thought and/or a suggestion.

Again, I know not everyone has only one hub. That is where I was thinking of having a default hub rather than "the hub".

(Edited to add, I DO realize this would probably be something that even if possible it would require an update to both the app and a new release on HE itself. So, I was not suggesting an immediate response or similar. Just thinking it could be taken up for consideration. I know I saw another post on this exact same issue just in the past week or two.

My other issue - for me to track down is why this phone keeps getting logged out. I have a work and a personal phone with identical battery saving settings. My wife's phone is identical to mine with line by line same settings. No battery optimaztion, no memory optimization, all critical apps on the no sleeping list. Wife's phone and Work phone haven't ever been logged out. Personal phone now several times in the past month. As far as presence, I have been immune apparently to the issues others have had with flaky performance. I had flaky performance on ST. Then found that those magnet holders and cases actually caused 99.9% of that issue. )

26

@bobbyD
I just noticed another weird occurrence that may possibly be related to my phone not showing a Red Dot for the geofence. At least I hope it may be related. I'd love to get the geofence back and working again.

I have a number of TP-Link Kasa devices in my list. They all use the community app/drivers from Dave Gutheinz (thanks DaveG !). I haven't added any new ones in over a year, so I hadn't run the app to scan for any new ones in over a year as well. Last month when the geofence issue began, I also looked through my Logs at one point to see if anything was misbehaving. One TP-Link outlet was giving errors because it wasn't showing up on my physical network (Bathroom Fan) and wasn't "responding." It is a device we use every day, so I knew it was still on the network.

I opened the Kasa App and it was not showing on the list of devices installed, but was showing as an available TP-Link device on my network. So I rescanned for devices and it added it back. I looked in my device list and the previous one and new one were both now showing. I changed the description of the old non-working device to XBathroom Fan so I could set it back up on the dashboard and know that I was linking the tile to the new device not the non-functioning device. I didn't dig any further into the non-functioning device in my list at the time.

Now fast forward to today and I noticed XBathroom Fan was still showing down at the bottom of my device list. So I was going to delete it, finally. Before deleting, I noticed its device ID was a MAC address. So before deleting I compared it to the new device of that name to see if the MAC address was a duplicate. They weren't, which was very odd. I have a list of all of my IOT devices with MAC addrs so I quick scanned them to find which this MAC address matched. It didn't match any! So then I went hunting for what shared this MAC address linked to the outlet that had stopped functioning in Hubitat. Turns out my cell phone is the true owner of the MAC address! The 'outlet device' was listed as last having shown activity in Hubitat on June 19th. I noticed it non-functional on July 19th when I scanned for and created the new device linked to that outlet.

Just now, I finally deleted the bad device from my list that shared my phone's MAC address. I also deleted data and cache for the Hubitat App on my phone and hoped the geofence would finally show up again when I logged back in, but alas, no red dot for a geofence showed up. But I haven't deleted or created a new device for my actual phone in the device list since it is currently linked as a notification device in a couple dozen rules and apps. That could be a lot of work to delete my phone.

Is there any way you can do a search in the back-end of Hubitat to see if the MAC address for my phone is somehow linked to something else that is the problem that is preventing a geofence red dot from showing on my app?

Thanks
Chuck

27

Last night I realized how the device MAC address got switched to my phone on the outlet. I thought I'd post the reason here in case anyone has a similar situation or is worried about their TP-Link app/driver doing something similar. The short version for those who want to move on is that my phone had borrowed the IP address assigned to that outlet when I edited the device name in the Hubitat device list and hit the Save button.

The long saga version for anyone still hanging around. My IOT devices are on their own subnet and all devices have reserved IP addresses. That is except my phone, since I don't normally connect to the IOT network subnet with my phone unless I need direct access to the hub. So when I needed to edit a couple device names, my phone got a DHCP assigned IP address that was the lowest number available. All of my device IP reservations start from the highest number available and go down. EXCEPT for my TP-Link devices. When I was with ST a few years ago, the TP-Link integration used polling to update those devices and stationary IP address wasn't as important. When I moved to Hubitat a couple years ago, the new TP-Link integration with Hubitat avoided polling but needed stationary IP addresses to find the devices. Or else you have to open the app and click to update the device list every time addresses change. So I made reservations for the TP-Link devices at their DHCP assigned addresses which were the lowest numbers available in the range.

Last month when my wife asked me to make sure her flat iron was unplugged, I realized the bathroom fan had taken over her dedicated smart outlet. So I moved another outlet to the bathroom for her flat iron. Those TP-Link outlets are set to turn off multiple times a day so no matter when she may get ready and forget to turn off the device, it goes off automatically.

During moving devices, I connected my phone to that subnet to directly access the hub settings. But this outlet was unplugged when I connected my phone, so DHCP gave my phone the lowest IP available which was reserved for this outlet. So when I edited the device name and hit save, the device driver updated the MAC address of the device at the specified IP address with my phone's MAC address. I don't normally use Hubitat to control that outlet, so I didn't notice the broken link to it for a month.

So now I made a IP address reservation for my phone on the IOT subnet so that this won't happen again. Tonight when I get home, I'll move the TP-Link reservations up to the highest numbers open so DHCP won't be borrowing reserved IP's when it picks the lowest available anymore. All of this happened about the time the Hubitat app on my phone stopped showing the geofence red dot. So I'm still holding out hope that removing a second non-phone device linked to my phone's MAC address may allow the Hubitat network to link my phone back to it's red dot on the Hubitat app.

Chuck

28

Any updates on this topic ??
I have the same problem

29

No, no good updates on this. My position always reports perfectly in the app, but I still have no red dot to be able to set the geofence. I've gotten messages from others who also have the same issue with no solution.

30

I have no red pin on an LG V20 and a Samsung Galaxy J7. LG says low accuracy (no data plan). J7 says high accuracy, but still no red pin. LG is Android v8.0.0. J7 is Android v7.1.1.

Just got my Hubitat yesterday to switch from SmartThings/WebCore to Hubitat/WebCore. So far it has been frustrating. No weather out of the box. Bug in presence sensing.

Hope things improve from here.

31

Openweather has a built-in driver. Pretty basic, but it works. You do need to get a free API key, but that isn't too bad.

That seems to be a phone by phone issue. Some people have no trouble, and others have no luck making things work. Staff have been trying to pinpoint why some work and some do not, but not sure of their progress. Mine seems to work fine on both of my Android phones, so it is possible to make it work.

Not sure if you are using the regular app, or the Beta version of the app. You might try the Beta version (think it is still available) and see if that makes a difference.

Some use other presence methods beyond the Hubitat app, and I do think that is the key to really making things work consistently. There are community based combined presence apps where you can take the Hubitat app, a connection to your Wifi, a Smartthings presence fob, or other means to combine and more accurately judge presence.

1 Like