Mobile Presence

Why Hubitat Elevation Home Automation
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IMHO, Mobile Presence was the achilles heel of Smartthings. It was extremely problematic for a lot of users (including my wife) and until ady624 came out with WebCore Mobile, I had no good solution. I even had a problem with Life360 with my wife’s phone.

I saw you support Life360, but how else can you determine mobile presence given there is no app yet? One thing I’d love to see is better integration with wireless routers as that is a great indication someone is home. I personally run a Ubiquiti network and I know Home Assistant has an integration with them. Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

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Ok for android phones but not for IOS
IOS devices shut down wifi when locked (unless you jailbreak them)

I wonder if you can get an ST presence sensor to work?

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Life 360 is our option at launch.

Our mobile app, when it is released, will have our own mobile presence feature.

I’m also sure some smart community developers will find other ways to use their phones to come up with presence solutions as well.

As for zigbee presence sensors, haven’t had much luck with them as most of mine are broken after trying to replace the battery. I don’t believe they are working yet on our system though. Let us know your results and we can get support tickets opened if it doesn’t work.

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I forgot about that iOS “feature”.

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This is actually one of the best approach in my opinion since local processing is the main push here.

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Seems to me, the beauty of being able to run code locally on the hub means you may not need to involve your home router at all with the logic. Perhaps a HubitApp could be created, that runs on the hub, that “pings” a list of addresses to determine whether or not your non-iOS phones are present, and then update Virtual Presence devices. Just an idea… :wink:

I believe the reason many ST users have added such scripts to their routers is because there was no way to achieve this on the ST hub.

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In light of the fact that this thing is set up for local processing, I have to assume this (that is, pinging non-iOS devices) should be extremely easy to implement right on the hub itself.

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I don't have the hubitat hub yet but wouldn't the webcore presence sensor also work on hubitat if the ST DTH for it is ported to run on hubitat as a driver?

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I am not sure if this is possible but I am noticing some weirdness in presence if you have both the Life360 in ST and Hubitat. Is this not possible? It seems that the only presence that will update is the last installed instance on the app no matter if it was on ST or Hubitat. So if I installed the app on Huibitat that is the only presence that is updated and ST is not updated and vice versa. I am using the custom refresh app on the ST so I think I can write a webCoRe to updated. Any thoughts. Also Alexa for example is not impacted by this it functions correctly.

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Correct, Life360 it seems only supports one endpoint per login account.
So running it on both hubs, under the same login will not work.

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Thank you!

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is there an ETA for when hubitat mobile app will launch?

thank you.

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Its in the works. As with any software (or my moms Thanksgiving turkey) its ready when its ready. As soon as I have a better answer, we’ll pass it on.

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well mom always has a target for her turkey dinner. that she never hits it is a different discussion altogether. but never in front of her :wink:

do you all have a target for the mobile app launch? :slight_smile:

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Yes. As soon as possible :slight_smile: in all seriousness its hard to nail due dates. We aren’t going to share dates but needless to say it is one of the highest priorities. It all depends on how things go. Would you rather have something that works or something that is broken but meets a due date?

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Don’t Andromeda this, plzkthx.

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eh … wasnt looking for a due date … just a quarter or month would have been good enough for an ETA.

quite realize you all are a startup building software from the ground up … so due dates are meant to be missed … not a big deal. :slight_smile:

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Life360 was useless on my wife’s phone. It reported well enough when she left, but was lousy with her arrival within the geofence. Same with the ecobee mobile presence.

You might wish to try the ST mobile sensor again. There’s a mod for it that eliminates the broken battery clip issue; you get a 4-AA battery pak, and take the circuit out of the fob and put it in there with 2 batteries. Solder the wires to the battery terminals on the circuit board.

Yes it’s larger than a fob. I keep it in my briefcase.

But it works. Mine’s been in business for weeks now; by this time in the fob, the coin battery would have weakened already to the point of the fob randomly triggering Home/away at all hours of the night.

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Guys
I use a combination of life360 and st presence sensors with “Presence Central” to turn on/off a virtual presence sensor
Been working reliably for me for a while

My converted battery packs have been working solidly in three cars for about a year now on the original batteries (unaffected by -6 c temperatures)

Andy

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Why is it everybody is saying router based presence doesn‘t work for iOS devices? I use this on my network with Home Assistant and it works perfectly. I only have iOS devices.
I think this is more about how the router works than how iOS deals with WiFi. I don‘t have THE answer to this question. But, all I can say is that my iOS devices always show as connected to my AVM FritzBox router (popular in Germany) as long as they are within reachable distance. If it is as many are saying then my wife’s iPhone 5 should show she is away since it has been in Standby for at least an hour, but my Home Assistant (which has presence capability with my router) shows her as being at home.
So, I really don‘t get why people think router based presence is bad if you have iOS devices.