Geofencing

C-8 hubitat, four iPhones set up as mobile devices. For some reason one of the phones is no longer triggering the Geofencing. Have tried removing the iPhone App, removing phone and re-adding. Manually sending a "Send Geo Event" on the iphone triggers the presence in Hubitat but this is not what should be happening. Any other ideas on how to fix this? C-8 is completely up to date, App on iPhone is up to date, iPhone is up to date. Nothing has changed in home where C-8 is installed, the C-8 is hardwired to network via Cat 6.

There are a number of threads on this, but using just the HE app for Geofencing is probably always going to be problematic. I think most folks have found that using 2 or more methods combined is the way to go.

When I tried just using HE as a presence sensor with my iPhones it would work great about 80% of the time. Then it would not wok 100% of the time for no apparent reason, until it started working again.

I currently use 4 presence sensor, the Alexa app, Geofency, Wifi presence and HE. This has been rock solid for over a year now.

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My problem obviously is there are things in Hubitat that I want to use the presence sensing with. Have Apple TVs in house that run homekit items for me, the presence sensing on them is very solid. Is there some way to send a homekit presence to trigger a Hubitat item?

One factor that beat me once upon a time was "Use this device for location"

Settings: <your name>: Find My: My Location pick This Device.

I once found that an iPad that never left the house had it set instead of the phone.

I use this also (the only homekit stuff I use actually), I created a "virtual presence sensor with switch", notice the "with switch" part, this is very important. Then you expose that switch to Homekit, then in homekit, make turn on when you arrive and turn off when you leave.

I also have Geofency Locative as well as Alexa (Alexa uses the same trick as Homekit). Geofency Locative is a little harder to setup but is very flexible because you can have many different zones and different triggers but you will need to have MakerAPI to use it.

Edit: I use Locative, not Geofency.

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I use Geofency and do not use MakerAPI.

Sorry, my bad, I wanted to say Locative, I never tried Geofency. Original post corrected!

I may have read your response incorrectly... But just in case it wasn't clear what @terminal3 was describing.... There are a couple of Community developed Apps that can take multiple pieces of information, like HE Geofence, Wi-Fi connectivity and others to produce a single presence reading, which you could then use in your automations. So rather than referencing the HE Device that is created in HE for your phone, you would use a virtual device that the Community App updates based on settings you configure, such as you need to be both "not present" according to the HE mobile App and off the Wi-Fi network, etc.

The question around the possibilities with the Apple eco-system I will leave for others, as I don't own any Apple devices.

Yes.

  • Create a virtual device and then set it to use the Virtual Presence with Switch driver.
  • Export that to HomeKit via Hubitat's HomeKit Integration or via Homebridge.
  • On your Apple device, in Home, create an Automation and have it set the switch of the virtual device you just created. It will take two Automations, one to turn it on (When I arrive) and one to turn it off (When I leave.)

Then on Hubitat, the Presence attribute will follow along and you can use it in whatever Rules you wish.

Yes giving this suggestion a try. Thank you.

Once you get it working for yourself, then adding additional household members follows the same pattern BUT you have to permit tracking on THEIR phone. Initially, when you're creating the first automations, there's only "When I..." there is no other person offered.

Follow this advice to invite/allow others to control your Home:

Then, when you create additional Automations, "When Anyone..." is offered and you can select within to be a specific person. Said another way.. you invite them to control your home, then they, on their phone permit it, which allows their geotracking data into your Homekit hub. You can allow them to Control Accessories Remotely, which is needed. There's also Add & Edit Accessories within your home or not and I'd suggest not.

Better than me, I have not gotten Geofencing to work at all and gave up.

Can someone please tell me where this app is located. I dont use iPhone, im setting this up for my daughters phone b/c life360 are jerks now!

The only thing on the app store is 'geofency time tracking'.

Looking at Geofency for replace to Life360+
Can anyone who is iphone (iOS) user please let me know how to set this up on my daughters iphone. I only use Android and tasker. I have zero hours exp on iphone.

I also cannot believe the missed opportunity for the Life360 corp. The could had easily asked for 5,10,15 dollars a month to plan to continue to allow automation users access to api. instead they choose to disconnect that revenue completely and loose users.