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 
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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.
So if you’re not moving and you don’t open a door (like when sitting watching TV or sleeping) your house will go into away unless you press a button?
That will get old fast. I would suggest adding a condition that you must also not be present. Use geofencing to flip a switch when you leave and combine that condition with no motion or sensors opened. Use the lack of motion and contact sensor switch as your trigger to check the condition (state of the switch) for no motion and no contact sensor activity + not present, else end rule.
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Not to mention you have to be gone for a half hour before away mode would start, assuming you open a door and restart the timer when you leave. This would be fine for lights or thermostats, but wouldn't be advisable for locks, HSM or anything else security related. Especially since an intruder would put your home right back into present mode.
I'm also just picturing being in a deep sleep at 3am and Google Home blasting through the house saying push a button because I haven't rolled in 30 minutes time.
I can see this being useful as part of an overall presence plan. Have the activity logic trigger a virtual presence sensor and combine that with other sensors like WiFi and geofencing. Then use thresholds to determine actual present/not present states.
Can someone explain to me how to use Life360 as presence sensor? I have App installed, circle and place set. Log in is OK. Now what?
Hi, are you still using this method? because from what im reading on the link, this sounds like the perfect compromise for accuracy and battery conservation and if it still works, i think this may be the best route for me.
Sorry for the response delay...although I'm not using Hubitat any more, I'm still using a variant of this technique to do presence detection on my current system. Despite being something of a patchwork approach, it works pretty well!
I've changed some things, though. For one, I no longer rely on my wifi connection to determine that I'm home; in my case, it just takes too long. For others, that may not be the case, so it could be worth keeping. Second, I found that the Exit Tasks in Tasker seemed a little flaky (probably just user error, though), so I revamped the logic to do away with them.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Hi all
I have now achieved 100% presence using 4 raspis and Brian Wilsons BTLE presence sensors around my property, combined with joewetzels combined presence app it only reports away when all 4 monitors say im away but reports home as soon as any of them report as home. each monitor cost me £20 to build and the tags are £15 each it detects me as present in about a 15-20m range
my door locks are opening flawlessly every time we get home.
i may one day incorporate something like life 360 for earlier warnings via geofence but at the moment i dont have a need for it.
The solution might be a little pricy for some, but to have a happy wife is worth any cost....
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Thanks, couldnt get it to work for me.
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