Most reliable presence detection

I just got my hub and started migrating devices and my apps over from ST. I finally got Life360 working (with your help) for presence detection. But now I'm wondering which is more reliable Life360 or IFTTT or ???. My smartphone is Android.
I'm thinking if I could detect my home router (wifi) that would be most reliable but I have no clue if that's possible.
Thanks.

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For me the most reliable presence device has been a smarthings fob.

You can definitely test for your phone connecting and disconnecting from your home WiFi using IFTTT. It works very well.

I use the iPhone WiFi Presence sensor. Also works with Android phones.

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Didn't even know that app existed. Nice. Time to go route about for other interesting apps I wasn't aware of...

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You and me both! The diversity of integrations offered by contributed code is amazing.

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Nice to meet up with you again buddy, fellow Stringify refugee :slight_smile:

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And by the way, its you my wife has to blame for introducing me to this device and the hours I'm going to be spending on it and its forum... :smiley:

:grinning:

My regards to the missus - take a day off and spend some quality time together!

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I submit that the most reliable is a combination of choices.
Life360, Locative (or another localized Geofence endpoint doohickey), Fobs, put them all together and virtualize.

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I have tried all of them, including, most recently, the ST fob, and I'll tell you that I don't like any of them. My idea of presence was that when I roll up to the house, the garage door would open automatically removing the necessity for me to push a button to open it and disarm HSM, turn on lights, etc. But none of the solutions that I have found so far work in anything that I would consider as an acceptable response time. Even using my ST fob with an Xbee as a repeater above my garage door did not give me the response time I would have expected. I am looking at ways to mount it outside to try and increase the range and therefore the time it would have to respond (I don't have any windows that face my driveway).
Now, your mileage may vary, some folks have had great success with the other options listed here. I mention this only to say that if you can't find a presence option that meets your expectations, you're not alone. It's not you. You may just have to find an option that fits you better than presence.
For me, that was a cheap RF relay that could work off of the Home Link opener in the mirror of my car. So, button 1 is for the door and button 3 is for that relay which is tied to a contact sensor. Happens instantly and works pretty much flawlessly. It isn't automatic but I'd rather press a button than wait in my driveway for 2 minutes for the fob to detect my arrival.

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I've achieved acceptable results using a combination of the WiFi Presence,Life360, and a virtual presence device.

I'm using these with RM 3.0 as seen below, detection of presence is very reliable on arrival and anywhere from 1 to 2 minutes on departure which works from my use case.

I also use the following RM 3.0 rule to refresh Life360 to speed up it's updates and keep it in sync.

Since you're an Android user, you might have a look at the method in this link. Instead of the SharpTools step, I used the Maker API to make calls to a virtual presence device. (Not throwing shade on SharpTools, BTW... It's a cool product and the developer seems like a great guy. I just seem to recall this step not being available for Hubitat yet, for some reason.)

Anyway, this method has been pretty solid for me. One caveat: I think Android Auto was interfering with the ability to detect my home wifi disconnecting, so that's something to watch for. Hope this helps!

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‘Locative’ and ‘WiFi presence’, combined using ‘Combined Presence’ works perfectly for my wife and I.
We’ve not had an erroneous issue for months !
Drive off, Mode is changed and resulting actions occur.
Walk up, same results. It’s been great.

Would you please go into more details please. I'm new to this forum and would like to start using features like this.
Thanks

I’d say start Reading here .. Use Locative for Presence
As with most things in HA, there’s a million different combinations of technology and Different ways to do things.

Also Hubitat now has its own Presence ability via the App.

You can use Life 360. Download app from Google Play Store or IOS (if iphone). Sign up with an account. Go into HE built-in apps and click Life 360 connect.
Now if you plan to use in your own code, we can answer that but let community know.

Just in case it may spur some ideas for others I stole an idea on another thread on the forum to build my own combined presence logic. I did this in RM because I like to fully understand and control the logic rather than use someone else's app for something I can myself.

Basically it builds the final property presence from left to right. We have me, my wife, and a possible guest (with an Iris key fob). On the left, the first thing I check for is the status of the Withings sleep sensors/pads to see if we are in bed. If we are then we are definitely at home lol. Then, for myself I use a combo of Life360 (works very reliably), mobile app (less so), and WiFi presence (bullet proof but very 'local' of course) to build a composite presence for myself with some simple logic that looks for combinations to activate if I'm at home or away. For my wife I'm just using Life360 and WiFi presence. For the guest, just the Iris presence sensor/fob.

I use a virtual switch to activate if we have a guest or not. This is important in order for the final declaration of "everyone out" to be calculated properly (so that lights and AC's go off etc). Another switch is used to set for property rental (we sometimes Airbnb the place) where our presence is then excluded.

It was fun to build and makes a nice dashboard. And to my surprise, mostly works :smile:

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Has anyone used motion sensors in their combined presence logic? I mean setting up a timeout lapse when no motion is detected.
Does that make sense?

This is just about what I am going to do. I would REALLY like to use Tile bluetooth trackers, but I am new to Hubitat and don't know how that endeavor will go. But my current plan

1.) Every time a door opens (various doors in house), set a variable to current time (seconds, Epoch)
2.) Every time motion happens, set the current time (seconds, Epoch)
3.) Once a minute have a task that checks if that variable is more than 1800 seconds ago, if so, assume everyone is gone.
4.) Have Google Home speak saying house is turning down unless a button is pressed.

Seems good enough. But I wish I could really harden this up with Tile bluetooth trackers without much extra work.