Now the only thing you may have probs with is when the phone goes to low power mode, wifi turns off. It's why a lot of us use "combined presence sensor" and use 2 or 3 items. For instance I use my phone and a fob on my keys (as does my wife) It seems more reliable.
and I use four different wifi presence sensors... !
holly cow...ok...so the more the better. Got it. Trying to get one to work at the moment..lol. Will try this on a basic automation and go from there. Hope it works.
Thanks for your help!
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The issue is really with the iphone... its power saving algorithm often causes it to fail to respond to a ping. So you get a lot of false "departed" events. So I use Joel's wifi presence sensor, which attempts to make an htttp connection to the iPhone and gets rejected (which means the iPhone was present to reject it). I also use a unifi presence sensor which queries my Unifi network console to see if a particular device is connected to the network. And then I do a regular ol' ICMP ping. I aggregate them all with timeouts. If ANY of them return "present" I assume the person is present. If ALL of them return "not present" for at least 5 minutes I assume the person really is gone. It is pretty accurate unless *** someone *** who will remain nameless turns off the wifi on their iPhone.
You could also try a geofencing app like Life360. It works pretty well, until *** someone *** objects to being "tracked" and disables the app, immediately locking them out of the house. Of course if they remembered their alarm code after they got home from a night of carousing it wouldn't be that big of a deal... at 2am. But I digress.
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