Curious when using Life 360 for Mobile Presence, is it using the home range in Life 360 that you set as a boundary around house to detect home and away or is the Hub detecting another way?
Wife came home today and it notified she was home when the door opened and expected the notification when she was in the 1500’ radius of the house I have set.
Seems also as soon as she leaves the house and looses wifi it says she is away rather than waiting the few minutes it takes to get outside of the 1500’ boundary setup
I’ll be paying more attention to this tomorrow when we both leave for work.
It uses the Life360 Geofence to detect presence. You may want to temporarily set up Rule Machine to send you a SMS text message for each phone’s arrival and departure. This is a good way to know when your Hubitat hub was informed by Life360 of the change.
Just be aware that there is currently a 10 SMS per day limit.
That’s what I thought. I have that setup to send an sms, seems it showed up when she opened the door. I’ll pay more attention tomorrow to it when I get home to see what happens.
You can also have Life360 send you a push notification (alert) when family members come and go. This would give you an easy way to measure any difference in time between Life360 detcting the change and Hubitat detecting it.
I have this set up with our two iPhones and my son’s Motorola Android phone. They all report both Life360 and Hubutat changes within a second or two of each other.
In Life360, you should see a map with your HOME location on it. Click on the Home Symbol, then click the “i” icon for more info. This should bring up a menu to configure your alert notifications for family members. This is also where you can adjust the size of the Home geofence.
On ST, I was using a Tasker/Sharp Tools/Autolocation geofence that (mostly) worked well. Until that’s working on Hubitat, it seems Life360 is my best, maybe only, option. Does the free version work for simple presence reporting with Hubitat or will I have to purchase some add-on tools?
My Google pixel is having the same flaky Life360 problem just like ST. I need to hit done in life360 connector often now. Is there a way to refresh a Hubitat app?
I have been using the free version for years now. I don't really need the extra stuffs.
Currently the only thing I’m still using ST for is location. I have the WebCore app on my phone and use the settings in WebCore to set the location around my house. When I’m present, it then sets a virtual switch. The status of this switch is relayed to Hubitat via the built-in hub connection.
The reason I still use ST is the ability to set different perimeters for the arriving vs. leaving. With arriving I can set a 50m area which means I can see my house when I drive up (since my presence unlocks my front door, turns off the alarm, etc). I couldn’t find a way to make the Life360 circle closer than that.
I also don’t like the fact that in the Life360 policy, they state they can’t (or won’t) delete your previous drive data.
The only way I was able to get any sort of reliability out of life360 was forcing a refresh of user locations every minute. This has reduced the battery lifespan on our phones a little, but not enough to be concerning.
On ST I setup webcore to refresh life360 every minute, on hubitat I use rulemachine to refresh every minute. I have a rule setup to send roomba to the dock when my wife gets within 1 mile of the house. With the refresh, it has been reliable enough that roomba has enough time to dock before my wife opens the door to the house.
I don't have anything setup for smaller distances, as I'm not too keen on automating door/security unlocks.
I don't understand this rule to refresh Life360 on the hub.... the Hubitat device is updated by a webhook from Life360 which is triggered from the phone update to their servers. Performing a constant refresh on the hub does nothing to refresh the Life360 status, unless there's a problem within Hubitat not refreshing the device for RM? Or has Hubitat also implemented polling on top of the webhook? Possible....
For whatever reason, both in in ST and HE, the webhooks get missed sometimes. For me it is about 25% of the time across the 4 phones in my family. I will get the notificaton from Life 360 that someone arrives home 100% of the time, but the status doesn't always update in HE.
Forcing a refresh compensates for that, and keeps the ST/HE device in sync more reliably. I don't do mine every minute, I've found every 5 minutes works for me.
It's been too long since I've touch ST so I can't comment on how they do it.
That's interesting with Hubitat though. So doing the refresh is a forced poll of the data at the point in time, which makes sense. I do not believe this was the "intentional" purpose but hey... whatever works.
If you have two locations ( or more), one will get the updates, the other(s) will not
if you use the same life360 with other apps (for example ST), one will get the updates, others will not.
It sounds like as soon as you have more than 1 app using life360, they all need to do refreshes (effectively polling).
It would be nice if HE had the ability to at least forward within HE environments, but I expect this gets very complicated with multiple HEs deployed...
Well, not super complicated. HE automatically in the background sets up the Webhook end point with Life360. There is no asking to do this. Life360 does not actually support any of this but it's there so it's used. However from Life360 they only support 1 endpoint for the webhook. So last one setup is the winner. (Unless you setup the end point to a proxy that will then send the request to multiple destinations )
Work around for multiple locations would be to NOT setup the webhook and only use polling for the locations. OR setup 1 location as the primary where you want/need the faster push responses and know that location 2 will require the use of polling to get any updates at all. If using the webhook just know to setup in reverse order where the Primary Location should be the LAST one setup so that it will be set as the endpoint for the webhook.
I assume with two locations, each doing refresh, they will keep "switching" the web hook to themselves...so you likely need both sites to refresh as the web hook will keep bouncing?
I don't know the specific Hubitat code but I wouldn't think the webhook would "switch" from a poll request. If it does then it becomes a bigger issue. You actually have to send a deliberate DELETE to the Life360 URL and then a new POST to update the webhook.
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