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Here's another caveat: The instructions at the top of this thread may be outdated at certain times.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.
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
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- 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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I would definitely review a pull request.
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Please add an option to rename Combiners, thanks.
It would also be REALLY helpful during testing to be able to disable/enable Combiners.
Has anyone else been experiencing funky behavior with this? It's been flawless until what seems like coinciding with latest hub update. I do have Life360 as one of the contributions but I see that everything is showing not present but the combined device shows present.
I use a combined presence with HE and Tasker on my phones. It has been flawless 99.9% of the time.
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Still working great for me.
Sounds like you need to break down the accuracy of the components you are using to check each of their accuracy, then look at the combined results if that is still an issue.
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Nope. Agree with Simon you should look closely at your input presence sensors.
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Yes! My wife and I use Hubitat app and WiFi presence and both of those show home/away properly, but the combined presence hasn't been changing. This is a recent (last week or so?) development.
(Rob is home, Tami is not)
When I noticed this yesterday, I clicked the Departed button in the combined presence device ('Tami') to set her not present and it changed correctly to present when she arrived. So far I've only noticed this not working for departures.
So it's not just me either. I have been using the combined presence for about I reckon some 18 months with not a hitch, and I'm using the Life360 as the gps with my wifi as the phone wifi input and the output is not changing it seems like or does it very very sporadically on departing. It pretty much shows switch turned on (the output switch that is) and yet I've left the house.
I walked this morning and was about a mile from my house, well outside of the wifi router range and watching the life 360 app, outside of the geofence as well, but yet my output switch never turned off.
