[RELEASE] Combined Presence

I remade this app in Webcore, it's working as expected now.

Sweet. Do you want to share your app? Maybe I can give it a try.

Sure!

It just follows the logic of this app, where Wifi devices can trigger arrival but not departed, and GPS devices can trigger both arrived and departed.

Unknown Device 22 and Unknown Device 2 are iPhone Wifi Presence Devices

Unknown Device 23 and Unknown Device 3 are Smartthings Presence Devices

Unknown Device 20 and Unknown Device 19 are the virtual presence devices I had made for this app to manage. It works perfectly now. I know this is sidestepping this app, but it just doesn't work for me after hours of troubleshooting.

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I have a novice question for this Combined presence app. I have used presence to arm the Hubitat HSM monitor when both my wife and I have left the house via Rule Machine. I used Life 360 and our Samsung phones for presence sensors. Recently, the HSM would arm when I left but my wife was still at home. This led to misery and anguish.

I read that the Combined Presence app could help with this issue. I used Hubitat Package Manager to install the app. I set up a a Boolean-Combiner for myself and my wife. I did not set up Standard Combiners for either one of us. I used the Life 360 presence and the Samsung phone for each of us to set up two boolean sets-one for me and one for my wife.

The problem is probably that my brain is too small to set this up correctly. Is there a resource for this app to explain how to setup the virutal sensors so that I can instruct Rule machine that the last person leaving arms the HSM and the first person arriving disarms the HSM? Thanks for your help.

This is a nice app to have, but i don't think it solves the real problem, that we do not have a reliable geofencing app. Or maybe i am wrong and someone could explain.
Let's say we have multiple geofencing apps combined. What happens if one of the apps does not wor k and it continues to show that you are in the geofence area? It does not matter that the other apps work because the logic would be something like all of them show not present. If you use the other possible scenario and set departed if any of the apps shows departed, it is the same case. It won't work.

The logic in this app is configurable so that if at least one of your geofencing solutions departs, the combined sensor can be marked as departed, even when one of the underlying sensors is “stuck” as present.

Since this thread is dedicated to discussion about one community developer’s solution to the problem of mobile presence (which in my experience isn’t limited to Hubitat), please consider asking more general questions like this in a new thread.

Or better yet, here’s a thread that was recently created and was meant to be a discussion about presence sensors in general (including mobile presence). This thread would be a great one to have a further discussion about the pros and cons of Hubitat’s built-in mobile presence solution.

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Hello,

First let me say that i am not criticizing your app. Every attempt to fix the problem is more than welcome.

Second, i have a suggestion. Could you add the possibility to choose a switch as presence trigger? I have a setup in which i use SmartThings presence trough HubConnect. I get a virtual switch triggered in hubitat. It might be useful for someone with similar setup.

Regarding the logic, the only feasible way i see is to use something like "any of these" arrives / departs, so if at least one of them works in time, the result should be ok.

No worries, this isn’t my app. I’m just trying to keep the discussion in this thread on topic (i.e. limited to this app, not mobile presence in general, or Hubitat’s built-in mobile app with geofencing capability).

I can’t tell from what you have posted so far which options for this app you have chosen to implement. A screenshot of the app as you have set it up is often helpful to understand better.

The post I linked to explains how to use what the dev calls “advanced bindings.”

That is one way to work around the issue of one presence sensor remaining stuck in the “arrived” state while others have correctly reported that you have left your geofence.

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Could you change the virtual switch to virtual presence? Or, add virtual presence sensor and add a rule to set is as "present" when the switch is on and "not present" when the switch is off.

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You can do that already with the virtual presence device you are using as the combined presence device. I have it on a "presence" dashboard as a switch. On the rare occaisions it doesn't pick up the change in presence from my HE presence, I just toggle it on or off.

Basically, I set up two "Or" combiners. They each have only one input - My HE Presence for each phone. I combined both of those into another "Or" combiner for determining if either of us are home. This works 99% of the time. Most often, when it doesn't work, it is because my compass calibration got off on my phone (usually after an update or exposure to a magnet). In those instances, I just toggle the virtual presence (as a switch) and then fix whatever problem was causing the HE presence not to report.

Presence Dashboard

Include Virtual Presence as a switch

I was replying to this comment

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Hey andutgv, I'm the dev who made Combined Presence. I don't post in here very often anymore, because my smarthome just... works. (Yay!) I posted a lot more back when I was getting it up and running, and writing apps to solve my issues.

It is definitely true that we do not have a reliable geofencing app. My experience is that the Hubitat app is 50% unreliable, the Alexa app is 10% unreliable, and HomeKit is 1% unreliable. I can't fix that though. Combined Presence was written with logic so that, as long as at least one of your sensors is functioning well at a given moment, it'll figure out the right answer.

It's solved the problem nicely for me and many others. That said, here's the caveats: I don't live in a city. I live in the country, outside a moderate-sized college town. My nearest neighbor is a couple hundred yards away, so I'm able to set geofence radiuses pretty large. They catch me arriving early, and my garage doors are usually open right about the time I get up the long driveway to the house. I haven't thought through the security implications of any of how this would work for someone living in a townhome in a city, or in a very different situation than me.

Here's another caveat: The instructions at the top of this thread may be outdated at certain times. I recommend using the "Standard Combiners". Don't use the "Advanced Combiners" until you've already tried the standard ones and know for sure that you want to do something different.

Good luck!

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Hello,

You are right about the reliability. HomeKit works almost flawless, Hubitat is the most unreliable. There is also SmartThings geofencing which i am testing at the moment. It seems to be more reliable and quicker than Hubitat, with the same radius (less than 200m).

At the moment i am using hub variables and rules to set presence, because i have to use virtual switches in HubConnect. I have not tested virtual presence but if it doesn't work with HubConnect than i could use a rule to pass the state from the virtual switch to virtual presence.
As a rule for setting presence off, i use any of the two geofencing and wi-fi. Problem is with setting presence on because i need it to be triggered before i enter the house, for automations, so i can only use a rule like "if any of these changes state to true".

@jwetzel1492 Feature request...

In the advanced combiner, could you add something in the likes of must have 3 sensors arrived to be considered arrived on the output sensor and 2 sensors departed to be considered departed. Number of sensors configurable by user of course instead of just ALL or ANY. This would make things really advanced and even more reliable.

Thanks for considering this!

I might have eggnog fog, but if I understand what you're asking for, you can already do this. You select which presence sensors to use in the "ALL" clause. Example:


If I misunderstood, never mind. :slight_smile:

Not quite, I have 3 to 4 presence sensors for each member of the family, I want it that if any 2 of the sensors arrived (not any of 2 but any 2 total) then set present.

Same for departed, set how many of the sensors must be departed before setting if virtual one as departed.

ex. Let's say I have 4 sensors (HE App, Alexa, Locative and WiFi) and the system is set for "any 2 or more of these sensors arrive", then if Alexa and Locative arrive, then it will be set to arrived.

If only one of these arrive nothing happens (this happens to us once in a while when at our friends house 6 houses over). But when a second sensor or more arrives, then it sets you as present.

Got it. Yes, missed that nuance.

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I probably won't make this change in my app*, but check out this app from another forum guy. I think he does what you're asking for: [RELEASE] Presence Plus - Creates a combined presence device

    • my app takes advantage of the fact that, at least for all the raw presence sensors I use, they don't give false positives on arrivals. Even a single arrival is a good signal. So requiring multiple arrivals would slow down the response. Now, I'm sure you're asking for a reason, so maybe you have different sensors than me, with different behavioral patterns. But the other app might give you what you need.

Thanks @jwetzel1492 for pointing it out, but as much as I respect his work with all his apps and drivers he brings to the community, I do not use his apps for several reasons. Thanks anyway, I'll just make my own custom app when I have some time on my hands. Keep up the good work!

PS If I add this to your code, would you consider accepting a pull request?

Getting pretty off topic, please bring the discussion back on topic.

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