For a while now I have been using Fing to monitor the devices on my network. I am interested in seeing if I can use it for presence in habitat. I have a local API key and it looks like there might be an API I could use. Would someone with development experience be interested in working with me on the side to see if this is a possibility (not to mention a learning experience for me?) Thanks!
What would the advantage of this be vs just pining the device IP directly from HE?
The best way I think I can explain is Fing (the software, not the box). It runs on my PC and monitors what devices join and leave my Wi-Fi network. I’m not really sure how to ping the device..
For example, when my phone leaves the network,I get a notification. As part of the app you can assign devices to certain people, so putting that and the notifications together, I seemed logical to use Fing as a Wi-Fi presence monitor. Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
This driver will check for your phone’s presence on the LAN directly.
I mean, it could be done, but you wont get instant updates from the Fing API, you will have to query it on an interval. At that point you might as well just ping for the device itself.
The only advantage over just pinging the device directly is you could get by without giving the device a static IP since Fing will track the devices with the MAC.
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I would imagine the number of devices may also play a part as to whether a separate system would be better than overloading the HE hub.
Also, what kind of notifications are possible. Can Fing also send some kind of notification to HE?
I didn't see anything in the API docs about pushing notifications out but I am not totally sure how it would be documented either. I am a little familiar with API docs but have only looked at a few.
But yeah, if Fing could push state changes to HE that would be ideal and definitely better than having the ping the IP constantly.
I too took a look at the API. It's real easy to get just a list of people back in Json format but can't figure out how to use a 'model' to get the status. I see it documented but don't know how to get it! 
Right, but I was trying to use /people (as stated in my post above).
Looks like people should have a currentState of ONLINE or OFFLINE.
It says the person needs to have a presence device assigned or it wont be there.
Sounds like you could assign multiple devices to one person and use that to determine online or offline.
Fing runs on my PC and monitors all of the devices on my network. As to HE, I would only have it send notification when devices assigned to my wife or my self arrive or depart. Here is an example of one of the notifications I receive.
In fact you can, that leads in some of the reports you could run (think parents keeping tabs on how long the kids are on line). For this to work, I would think you could only assign one device to each user, most likely their phone.
Sorry for the late reply, got swamped last night and today.
A few more things to follow up
A device assigned to a user (my wife’s
The time line of events it generates
Problem is I do not think there is a way to push those events out, HE would have to poll the API every few seconds.
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Ahhh ok. I appreciate you and @bptworld taking a look at it and giving feedback if it would be doable.
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