Did your input sensors go to away? And which combiner version are you using?
Looks like 2.2.1 on the presence sensors, I know the wifi sensor most definitely did. I will report on the life 360 after a few errands since I uninstalled your combined sensor app, life 360 off my phone and hubitat off my phone, then reinstalled all to get latest versions. Then, went into all of my apps to update the new virtual sensors created.
WiFi sensor going to away won’t trigger the combined sensor to go to away. That’s by design. Most likely, the Life360 sensor failed to switch to away.
Total noob to Hubitat and home automation and hoping for some guidance on setting this up properly.
Testing presence for myself and my wife and have tried a few iterations. I have notifications setup to know when the status changes. We walk the dog outside of our geofenced area every day, but our presence status does not change.
Wife - Standard Combiner:
- iPhone and wifi as the input sensors
- Is E home as the output sensor (virtual presence)
- Result: 1 notice that she departed the house and a notice moments later that she arrived. Both while we were in the house.
Myself - Standard Combiner:
- Life360 and wifi as the input sensors
- Is D home as the output sensor (virtual presence)
- Result: no notifications
I've also tried using both my iPhone and Life360 as input sensors, but no notifications for that setup either.
I also have a Boolean setup with Is E home and Is D home as the inputs and Is Someone home as the output. But I don't think that's relevant to not being able to get this to work.
Looking for guidance on what I'm going wrong. Is there additional information I should provide? Thank you!
The presence rules that have worked for us for a couple of years now, using Life360 and Wi-Fi inputs:
-
If now PRESENT and Life360 and Wi-Fi both NOT PRESENT, then switch to NOT PRESENT.
-
If now NOT PRESENT and either Life360 or Wi-Fi PRESENT, then switch to PRESENT.
In English: it takes both going negative to say we've left, but only either one positive to say we've come home.
You may know this but I thought I would mention it. Wifi presence can only really be used as a arrival sensor. At least for IPhones. The Wifi sensor will drop presence whenever you Wifi connection has not been used for some amount of time. When it's connected you are in range of your wifi, when it's not connected you may or may not be outside of it's range..
Thank you. Yes, I did know this. Since my virtual presence sensor is never going into a departed state, I've tried to test manually. This is what I did, but there was no change to the presence sensor (not sure if my method would work as a test):
- Turned off wifi on my phone
- Manually set my "Is D home" presence sensor to departed
- Turned on wifi on my phone
Hi all.
I have an idea for a notification to flag if something has gone wrong. I've had such bad problems with Life360 where it stops working but I don't realise for days/weeks.
I know that this app is designed to mitigate that problem, but I'd still be interested in getting a notification if either an input sensor or an output sensor does not change for a period of time (say 2/3 days).
I'm sure I should be able to set this up using a rule but I can't work out how.
Would be interested in any opinions.
There is a setting to have it notify you if the inputs stay out of sync for a half hour. In my case, I use 3 inputs:
- Wifi presence
- HomeKit presence
- Alexa presence
Let's say the Alexa one stops working. Now, 30 minutes after I leave home, I'll get a notification that the inputs have been out of sync for too long.
My point is that, in theory, both sensors could fail at the same time and then I wouldn't know it was working and that notification you mention wouldn't help.
That is true. This is why I think it's important to have multiple presence methods combined, so that they can't all be taken down by a single fault.
For example, if my wifi presence stops working, that won't stop HomeKit and Alexa from doing presence using geofence.
And if my gps stops working and prevents geofence events, that won't stop my phone from connecting to my wifi.
Unfortunately, if every input sensor shares the same failure modes, I'm not sure how you would detect they weren't working, unless you just observe that your automations aren't triggering. (My example: when either my wife or I arrive home, I have an automation to automatically turn on the lights outside our garage. If they don't come on as I drive up, I have a good hunch something is wrong.)
I just have a notification fire when the main combined sensor changes. If I leave, and do not get the notification, then I know one (or all) of my child level sensors are not working. Same on arrival.
Yup, that's a good way to do it too. I also have that.
This is a great app. They had fixed all my presence issues and made it much more consistent. Unless something crazy happens, it can fix many problems with a single presence sensor or scripting yourself. I have moved from 360+ to OwnTracks, which helped make that switch seamlessly without changing WebCore or RM Rules.
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@jwetzel1492 I know you do get notified when one or more of sensors are not triggering. Sometime you turn off logging reduce noise and overhead. However, would it be possible to notify not just it is inconsistent but which ones. So if you miss it from the logs you can get from the history from the notifications.
Another vote for this request.
I will take a look!
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Question for the community:
I am working on the next major revision of Combined Presence. I would like to know if anyone has important use cases of the Advanced Combiners. I do not use them anymore, and have even come to think of them as harmful. I am considering deprecating them.
While current users could always continue using them without upgrading, I am wanting to know if anyone has an argument why they should continue to be a part of the latest package.
Thanks!
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I personal don't. I believe the native options have been working great for me.
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I am actually using them, perhaps unnecessarily, because I like having WiFI included in the logic for depart. If GPS and WiFi depart, then set departed. I find that every once in a while my GPS sensors (hubitat, google assistant) glitch and report departed, so I don't want the virtual device to go to departed if it's still connected to WiFi, is there a better way to handle this?
