I am currently using presence combiner with life 360 and wifi tracking based off IP addresses from me and my wife’s phone. I’m having 2 issues.
First, the IP addresses on our phones seems to be shifting every few days. Not sure the cause of this. I have some orbi mesh routers.
Secondly, the life 360 devices seem to be breaking occasionally. I was able to fix it the first time by removing the devices and re-creating them from start. The app knows exactly where I am but the devices in the hub don’t seem to work right. I am using a refresh every 5 minutes and also refreshing again right after the rule is triggered.
The rule works fine when the presence sensors are working. It is when they break that everything falls apart.
Any advice? Ways to fix this of a better option over L360?
I used L360. There have been issues with this over the last few days because of AWS and L360 issues. With that said I use L360 + Hubitat GEO + UNIFI Networks App; this is for my wife and I. The kids are only L360 and Unifi. I have tried the IP but with phone like the iPhone it isn't consistent. Either way you have statically assign either MAC (on the phone) and/or IP (from your router). L360 on the phone you need to make sure certain power settings are disable for that app and the app always has background service enabled.
Once that is all setup I use GitHub - joelwetzel/Hubitat-Combined-Presence: An app for Hubitat to combine the values of presence sensors.
To combine all those inputs into a single Presence Sensor.
So, L360 make sure your power and app settings are all correct for the device you are using. (Any Geofencing applications should be the same).
If you are using IP need to statically assign both MAC and IP Address. (Make sure your power setting doesn't disable the Wi-Fi on the phone)
Use some sort of an application (you can try rules, but I found this not as good as the apps) to combine them all into a single device.
In other words... go to your iphone wifi settings for your orbi SSIDs amd change "private address" to off. Otherwise it randomizes the MAC address of the iPhone.
I can't get my household to adopt life360... "why do you need to track me? I always arm the alarm system when I leave the house [ed: not true]. I don't need it automated. I've never set off the alarm when can't remember my alarm code. [ed. also not true]." I'm still messing with a combination of Hubitat PING and iPhone Presence to see if I can use this "passive" method of presence tracking, bit as @jsarcone mentions, it seems pretty inconsistent. Still working on it though!
Or as @jsacone mentions you can have you router reserve the same IP address for your phones. I typically find it's easier to do. I think this is how you would do it for your router.
You are correct. If you are doing IP address you need to setup both to Static settings. I'm only doing MAC based IP address can be whatever and let the DHCP hand out whatever address. Easier to manage.
I had the same issue. What I had found out is my wife set up the initial Circle and I was leveraging that. She had invited other people into that Circle and this had caused problems. So other people were setting up notifications for their homes as 'home'. This was confusing things even though those users work near those locations. I created my own Circle A my own notification that is separate from everybody else. This fixed all those inconsistency issues that I was seeing. Keep your circle isolated and only for the automation portion. You may even want to set up a separate account just for the habitat and then join everyone else to that dedicated Circle.
I'm not saying this is what happened to everyone else, but this was a major concern / issue that I had noticed. If anyone's using Life360 then do not share your circle with anyone else.
Of course, if you're leveraging IFTTT today, you can use geofencing with that product as well. There are many options for you, however I believe adding them together will be just as important as what you are using to figure out your geofencing. Some use Google others use Alexa but there are many options, and the key is aggregating them all together to work seamlessly. More data points more accuracy. I find between 2 to 3 data points are typically enough, but I wouldn't go much more than 3 to 4.
Any sense on which seems to be the most consistent? I got the impression it was L360. I’m going to try and re set it up one more time and see if it holds. Maybe it was a setup error on my end.
For me Life360 has been pretty good. However, others have had more success with other solutions. I've had limited success with IFTTT. I installed it today to play around with just for testing. Many others have had success with other solutions.
Remember to create your own Circle without anyone else modifying it. Keep it just for automation. That is what I did and modified devices to be reliable as possible as I mentioned before.
When I first started using Life360 on Hubitat. My wife would complain a lot. Since I took those steps, it has been very stable. Note that you may need adjust your radius. If it is too small, it will not trigger in time, but if it is too big it will trigger too early, it will depend on if you are driving or walking for example. This is where WI-FI plays an important part. The combined sensors
I've been playing around with IFTTT, and it seems to work well. There is more configuration to get this working. But at a high level you need to set up the mobile app for IFTTT to run in the background. Then in your IFTTT configuration you will need to say if in this area, or exit this area, you perform a webhook. That webhook will post to your URL where your Hubitat is connected to then either using Webcor or RM will see the push to that URL and Trigger whether or not a virtual presence sensor is present or not. Unfortunately, most phone presence sensors are cloud-based otherwise you must look for a hardware device to accomplish this. So, keep in mind that all these diverse types of geofencing solutions are dependent on the cloud and your network and how stable they are. I spent many hours tweaking and optimizing my network where it is very, very, consistent. Only as consistent as AWS and the provider stay up.
If you leverage IFTTT each person needs their own IFTTT account with the app running on their mobile device. What will be consistent is they all be pointing to your habitat URL with slightly different identifiers the show which user is triggering which rule. But it's free (up to a point, I'm an earlier member Pro), it takes a little bit of work however it does work.
Currently switched all my automations for away to delay 10 minutes and run based off a change in state of the alarm system to away. We always set it anyway. I am going to give IFTTT a try when I have a chance. Boy is it a pain in my a** to debug something while away when I need to be home to look at the logic...
