I'm new to Hubitat having bought my unit only last week during the sale. I've installed it, poke around and am excited to get started. One thing that convinced/motivated me was the apparent flexibility of Rule Machine. So I am starting out by implementing a feature I built many years ago which is that of a "stat holiday aware" alarm clock.
Anyways, one thing that I want of this alarm is to be presence aware. If I'm at home, it should go off. If I'm not home but my way is, it should not. (My wife gets up before I.)
In looking into this topic of presence, I see many components that seem to coincide, overlap or otherwise provide this but I'm rather confused:
There is a device type of "virtual presence".
There is an app for the Life360 service.
There is a device for the smartphone app.
There is a contributed driver on Github from joelwetzel for the iPhone.
Maybe what I'm looking for is an overview/primer on the 'Hubitat way'. I get the sense that Hubitat is flexible and offers basic building block for achieving whatever outcome I desire.
I searched the doc and don't find a section/chapter on the topic of presence. I'm willing to start the topic page but I need a bit more understanding. Can anyone shed more light on this topic for a newbie?
Hey George,
Welcome to the forum!
I am pretty new to this too and currently working through this as well. I originally came in when the HE iOS app launched and was exclusively using that for presence with modes. IE if present run modes normally, if not present set to away. But i've found the app hit and miss (my wifes iphone 7 never misses a login, but my iphone Xr is sometimes 90% and then sometimes 50% success).
So yesterday I installed life360 free app on both phones (i had an issue where I setup 2 places and the HE app didnt like that, just setup one place "home") and have that as a presence sensor and then this morning i've setup the Wifi Presence community app (just locked the IP addresses on the router with a higher IPs so theres less chance of a conflict).
Then i've just added the combined presence one you have linked above. So my phone has 3 sensors (HE, 360 & Wifi) and same the wife. Then created 2 virtual sensors (im home, shes home) then a master presence (someones home). For now for testing I am just going to fire the combined presence for notification so i know thats working (I guess side note make sure you're HE and 360 geo fences are about the same size).
But I already have rules and events based on my previous "presence" setup (just the HE app) so now I have to go back and write/fix them once I know the new setup is stable.
Hope that answers your questions
p.s. I setup a new dashboard, manual tiles, then in the config changed the layout to 30x30 tiles (saw that around here somewhere) then setup my tiles like this so i can see if there are any issues while I test it as well.
So,
To actually answer your question (my coffee must of just kicked in), you could after all that setup a solid (multiple presence sensors) rule that if you arn't home, alarm is to fire, and the same for reverse.
What are you using as an alarm ?
Thanks for the speedy response. I wasn't expecting such a verbose answer. It's very helpful!
I haven't settle on what to use as the alarm. I have been using my Sonos' alarm feature to play a live radio stream which works quite well. I am considering this.
But your explanation confirms my impression. I think this topic merits a wiki page to explain the mechanics with Hubitat and to offer some (evolving) best practices.
My experimentation so far have been stymied by a few missing pieces. I figured out (RTFM) that I need the Pro version of the Lutron Caseta bridge so I've ordered a replacement. I've worked out how the Sonos playback feature works (tedious!) but am grappling with the process of discovering the URI for what I wish to play. I'm also running into a brickwall with the TTS feature which I found on the Sonos device page and also discussed on the forum. I can't seem to invoke that from my action. I think I'll need to jump/start another thread for that.
Apologies for my grammar, its not my vocation!
In regard to presence and HE, there are many avenues. They have an infant iOS app but they have advised they are chipping away at it piece by piece. But the beauty of HE is, as you said, there are many ways to skin a cat. And sometimes its someones pref to do it one way and not the other and we have the freedom to do it like that.
Yeah TTS is still beyond me at this stage too.
I have another dumb question then. I get that aggregating multiple individual presence signals will likely work more reliably than a single sensor. So how do I do this aggregation?
I have created a rule inside Rule Machine to propagate the presence derived from my smartphone's Hubitat app but that's not adequate. How do I do a 'sum' of multiple presence signals as you suggest inside Rule Machine? I don't see where I can grab multiple presence signals and merge them into the one.
You need to check out the built in app Mode Manager. With it you can set all kinds of mode changing conditions, including presence.
I have an iPhone Xs. I use the HE app on my phone for presence. After a few hiccups in the beginning, it's worked pretty well. My backup is the Alexa app on my phone, which also works pretty well.
This screenshot is from the Mode Manager app. The mode based on presence is from my iPhone. The Away and Home modes set with switches are via Alexa, which triggers those switches based on my presence in that app.
BTW, no dumb questions. I'm pretty new here, too. This is a great community.
I have poke around with mode manager and get that.
But my difficulty is more fundamental. I want to aggregate multiple devices (presence sensors) into one virtual device. Once I build this virtual device, then I can use it to drive everything else... mode or what-have-you.
To make my question concrete, your screenshot shows a tile named "Everybody Home" which is derived from "Steven Home" and "Alice Home". I assume that "Steven Home" and "Alice Home" are virtual presence sensor built up from the tiles to the immediate left of the tile. Am I understanding the picture?
That was @stevebott123's dashboard, so I'll let him answer how he did that.
I haven't needed to do that sort of thing myself. But if I were to tackle it in RM4, I'd probably have the condition be any of the possible presence sensors changed. And then write some if statement to see which were home and which weren't, and set a virtual switch based on the results of my if.
I am aiming to avoid purchasing yet another gadget here. However, I suspect I might need to do so if I want to solve the context problem. I.e., differentiating between driving vs transit/walking.
Anyone know how to work with NFC within Hubitat? One idea I had was to put an NFC tag in the car and use that to indicate whether I am driving or not.
I got a pair of the SmartThings Arrival Sensors (Fob) a couple months back and found that they did OK. The batteries were going to be a problem, that was clear. Like a lot of people here, I got a couple of the AA battery holders and took the Sensor apart. It has to come apart for changing the normal battery, so it was drop dead easy. I took the circuit board from inside the plastic and 3M Command Strip'd it inside the battery holder and tossed that in both my car and my wife's. Looks like the AA batteries just might last a very long time
I use Apple's HomeKit presence combined with the SmartThings Fob now.
