Hi there!
I have been super impressed with all things Hubitat except for the Presence function. I already had Life360 installed on my phone (per my wife's insistence) but I've never had the location services set to "always on" because it literally kills my battery in no time.
So, I've been playing with the Wifi Presence sensor which works very well and the built in Hubitat Geofence. This works sometimes, but other it just seems to space out.
Does anyone have any solid working sans-Life360 Presence Rules working?
I don't HAVE to have this functionality (not a deal breaker) but I am wanting to do things like close the garage door when I move outside the Geofence.
Currently I am using these apps:
Build in Hubitat Geofence (shows up ■■■ device [Name] iPhone - works fine
Wifi Presence Sensor - seems to work fine
Combined Presence - Combining [Name] iPhone (GPS?), Life360 (GPS?) if I happen to have it running, and the Wifi Presence Sensor (on the wifi side)
I have the Combined Presence app aggregating to a Virtual Presence sensor that I created just for this.
I think this is all set up correctly but I get intermittent results. And to make this even stranger, I've had left the garage door up when I'm at the house and had it close on me.
One thing of note is that normally put my phone into Airplane mode at night while asleep.
I'd love to get your thoughts on the setup.
Thanks!
Presence is a frustrating scenario, unfortunately. Most people will combine several presence readings together. Be aware that your phone also turns off wifi when not in use, so you will get false reads on that too. Look into presence governor or combined presence. Two community apps that have good reviews. If you search them out there will be a release on each with installs and instructions. I've tinkered with them both. I use life 360 and decided to deal with the latency.
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I use a pressure sensor on my bed for nighttime presence so it's not dependent on my phone.
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Yep, that's the one I'm running (package manager one). Should be V2.
I think the real fly in the ointment is the Hubitat native Geofence. It seems like this is the one that is intermittent.
Yes, I agree. I do not have it included in the presence calculations for my own house.
A good geolocation alternative for iOS is Geofency. I have it make HTTP requests to a rule that sets presence. It probably performs better because it has a singular purpose. It’s also not tied to a cloud service, which is a plus.
https://www.geofency.com/
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I just downloaded the app. Do you mind sharing how you set this up to work in something like Combined Presence?
Sure thing.
I created 2 rules in rule machine (Justin Arrived & Justin Departed). The trigger is a cloud endpoint (copy the Cloud End Point URL). This produces a URL that you can make an HTTP GET request to.
In Geogency I configured a Webhook and enabled Notify on Entry and Notify on Exit using my rule machine cloud endpoints.
Then my combined presence looks like this:
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You're awesome! Thanks!
One more question though, and I have searched but what is the easiest way to get the cloud end point? I'm missing something.
EDIT
I got it. Didn't realize that the endpoint was already an option when creating a new rule!
Okay wait.
I get how to create the Arrived and Departed Rules (I think), but when I create the entry it just has the URL in the action and it doesn't say "arrived() on Eric iPhone".
How did you create that part?
This is what mine looks like:
The action I picked was:
Do I need the Maker API app do do this?
I use Life360 for presence and it has been flawless. The key in my mind is to make the presence circle bigger. I think that most people have problems with it because they make the radius around their house too small. I have mine about 3500 feet in diameter and it has never failed me.
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I really only have 2 issues with Life360. #1 is that it SUCKS my battery dry (if I leave location services on all the time) and #2 is that I bought the Hubitat to really be local and I don't really want to have to rely on the cloud. #2 is not really too big of a deal to me, but #1 is the deal breaker.
For your action, you want to select "Run Custom Action"
Ahhhh! Thanks so much for that. I have a ways to go before I am a Hubitat master.
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Dang. I thought I had it, but did not.
One last question. Your output sensor, is it just a virtual presence (Justin's iPhone Combined)?
I'm using the device setup by the Hubitat app (I still use it for notifications), but it could be a virtual presence. You don't want it to be your combined presence device. I have 3 devices:
- Justin - Geofency
- Justin - Wifi
- Justin - Combined
So you bring up an interesting point. Your device "Justin - Geofency" has got to be a virtual presence, right? But how do you sync this Device with the Rule "Justin Arrived" or "Justin Departed"? There seems to be a core concept that I am not understanding with Hubitat.
Is this were the Mode manager comes into play?
Mode manager does not come into play here.
Sorry, I might be confusing things here... In my case "Justin -Geofency" is "Justin's iPhone" in my screenshots. For each of the rules (arrived/departed) I select "Justin's iPhone".
My devices according to my screenshots are:
- Justin's iPhone
- Driver: Mobile App Device (if using Hubitat app) or Virtual Presence
- connected to rule machine for arrived/departed
- Justin iPhone Wifi
- Driver: iPhone Wifi Presence Sensor
- Justin's iPhone Combined
- Driver: Virtual Presence
- connected to combined presence app)
