You actually can’t. The geofence on the Ring app only sends alerts reminding you to Arm/Disarm. It actually won’t do it for you. There are many times where it sends me a reminder but I’m driving and by the time I park, I forget to set it to Away. The Disarm isn’t such a big deal to me, but the Arm is the problem for me personally.
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At the end of the day, I do want Hubitat to be authoritative of the “Modes” since I’ll be building many other routines based on that (like lighting schedules etc). It just so happens that one of the routines I want to build for the “Away” mode is to Arm my Ring system. I may dip my toes in that unofficial Ring integration, but I’m usually just leery about trusting something unsupported with the security system 
The virtual contact sensors would actually work as long as Alexa lets me interact with the Ring security system with a contact sensor. I actually tried to do the Location trigger on Alexa and I would get an error if I tried to do anything with the Ring system at all, so it’s just generally not supported by Alexa.
So is there a way to tell Alexa to arm/disarm your Ring system? If so, you "open" the virtual contact to arm, and "close" to disarm. Use whatever logic on the Hubitat side you want to decide when to do so.
A couple routines in Alexa to arm and disarm using whatever you'd say to her to arm (or more directly with the Ring skill if that's possible). Again .. anything you can tell Alexa to do with your voice, you can initiate in Hubitat.
Yup! I can and that was the direction I’m headed towards with the virtual contact sensors to initiate it base on the HE “Mode”. Thank you again for helping me figure out that “hack” because it seems to be the only way I can get Geolocation and Ring to “play well with each other” (apart from that GitHub unofficial solution).
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You are correct. You can only disarmed ring.
I don't use Hubitat or Alexa for geofence with Ring but I do have Hubitat disarmed my ring with a pico remote. I know the ring integration is unofficial but I have zero issue with it for years now. Maybe give it a try since you can use the ring sensors for other automation rules.
Haha idk why but I’m just leery of something unsupported with my security system. I’m sure it’s probably fine.
Your idea with the pico button is exactly what I’m going to do with a virtual device (like a contact sensor). I’ll have the Geolocation drive the “Away” mode in HE and then set a virtual contact sensor to OPEN when the mode is set to Away. Pass this virtual sensor to Alexa to then Arm ring when it’s OPEN (“Away”). Someone else here showed me this trick and I feel as tho I’ll be using this for a few things.
I have pico remote in my vehicles and bedroom for various control and armed/disarmed ring is one of them.
Worst case scenario for unsupported integration is to remove it. What could go wrong right? 
....
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I find that being in Australia Alexa still has some limitations, one of them is geofencing, you cant add additional people to the Australian Alexa account, or not so that their phone can be used for geofencing. What that means is only my phone out of the family can be used for geofencing in Alexa and that is pretty useless, with the Life360+ app on Hubitat I'm all good and can automatically arm when we have all left the house and setup some spoken 'welcome home' messages when we get back.
This is good to know! If you’ve tried different geolocation apps, is Life360 the one you recommend the most? I was going to try HSM, but willing to use others.
I use a few different apps for geofence and merge them into a single geofence:
- Geofency
- Hubitat App
- Homekit
- IP address for my phone found on the network via a Hubitat App
And there are many more options. However, in my experience, combining a few is a good idea.
If you're in the US then Alexa will probably work OK for you if you just want arriving or leaving home, I am very happy with Life360+ though as it covers a much broader geofencing setup such as arriving or leaving home and arriving or leaving work/school etc. Multiple places can be setup and used in Hubitat.
I have thought about using a few options and merging them but haven't really needed to so far and have used just life360 for the past couple of years, occasionally it is a bit slow and the alarm doesn't auto disarm (there are a few other rules around this such as the door lock keypad being used as well as arriving home on life360 etc) but 99% of the time it is good and Alexa announces (via echo speaks) when the alarm is auto disarmed anyway so you soon know if you need to manually disarm on the keypad.
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This is a good suggestion! Do you have an example on what an “Away” mode would look like using a combination of these different apps?
One problem we’ve noticed with our dog’s Fi collar (uses AT&T cellular service for the geolocation), it would sometimes say she’s like 0.3 miles away when she’s actually just sleeping on the couch lol. That would be problematic if we only depended on one app to determine our location especially if it’ll act like our dog’s collar.
Also, what’s the name of the app do you use to see certain phones are connected to the WiFi? My husband was wondering if this would be better.
In order to combine multiple presences into one, I use the following app:
The driver that finds the phone’s IP on the network is;
And like you, I find that some solutions work in some cases, some in others. The presence combiner seems to make them all work better.
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Thank you this is super helpful! Do you recommended putting these multiple apps in an OR or AND operand? I feel as tho maybe AND is better (e.g. Geofency away AND Hubitat away AND WiFi away, then Mode = “Away”)? If our internet connection dies or one of us leaves our phone, we can just override the Arming of the security system, right? Rather than dealing with our system Arming/Disarming while we are home. Not sure what’s worst.
Alexa wouldn’t work for us if it only lets you use one phone to determine geolocation
Where are you located, if in the US then this is not the case, if in Australia (and I assume other places as well) then I'm afraid that's the case. In short if you cant do this (I think this is right but of course I dont have the household profile option so cant check) then you cant add more than one phone for geolocation.
Open the Alexa app on your phone.
Tap the More tab at the bottom.
Select Settings and choose Household Profile. An overview of Amazon Household displays.
Tap Start.
Invite a family member to share your Echo.
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Thank you! Do you know on top of your head if those work as OR statements? Or if those work as AND statements? Or do you pick? I should probably just try it lol. Not at the other home to try atm tho.
I was going to add the Alexa app works pretty well for Geo location, and you can have two phones control geo location. On IOS anyway.
You can create a routine in Alexa that when your phone leaves or enters a location that it turns on a switch. That switch can be a virtual switch in HE. This may be different now as I set it up a long time ago. The problem was on my wife's phone I could not see the smart home devices when creating a routine. She can tell Alexa to turn on a smart home switch while in her account but I could not create a routine to turn it on. When Alexa added the custom action item in the routines it fixed the issue. So in the routine I can't just turn on the switch directly but I can create a custom action, which I can say Alexa turn on a switch, and that works. I used the Alexa app as my main Geo location app for quite some time.
All that said I, like others have mentioned, use several geo location devices. and use a combiner. I have seen two times when Alexa Geo location stopped working for several weeks at a time. That is why I added GeoFency. As far as I know it has never failed and I have been using it for a year or better now. Since I use the combiner it could have but between it, the Alexa app, Wifi Presence, the HE app itself I have not had a miss in a long time.
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I suspect it may be different for arrival and departure. I would try for an “OR” on arrival and an “AND” on departure. For sure, if an IP is detected, then it sees this as an arrival. Departure ignores the presence of the device on the network I think (as devices can seem to linger, or even connect / disconnect during the day)
