A few general questions

General Discussion
1

Hey I’m new to ST and had a few general questions.

1… Is there a pinned topic somewhere that I missed with a list of things you can do? I’ve seen posts scattered about, but most of what I’m seeing in trouble shooting. I’m familiar with the general idea from using ninja blocks, but I’m far from an advanced user. I’m just looking for ideas that don’t involve coding.

2…Is there a list of compatible parts WITH pricing ?

3…And lastly…I bought the starter kit and set it all up. Tested it out and everything worked great. Day 1 it set itself to armed mode when my wife and I both left for work. When I got home it did not recognize that I was home and I had to manually change it. I didn’t think to check, but I’m sure my presence was set to away. It did recognize that my wife came home.

Day 2 this morning when I left for work it saw it as me arriving and I’m still there according to the app. It did recognize my wife leave buy never set the mode because it still had me at home.

I’m about 50 miles away. I’ve ruled out the phone being an issue. And I use my GPS daily for work. Not Google maps but an actual GPS program for navigating the land I work on and its always 100% accurate. The only thing I can think of that I may have done is using juice defender on my phone. It shuts down data signals when the screen is locked. But I did use my phone last night and this morning before work so it wasn’t inactive the whole time.

I searched that problem extensively and couldn’t find a solution. Sorry in advance if I missed something

2

No not with pricing as the price can vary wildly from vender to vender and ST supports ALOT of devices that are not branded ST.
http://www.smartthings.com/compatible-products

It sounds like you are using mobile presence, there are several threads discussing this and attempts to resolve but yes it works better for some than others and no there is no single resolution. You may want to hit up support to see if there are any settings to tweak outside of this support article. I use the key fobs for presence detection and in my home it is stable. I also have several wire/plug in zigbee devices that make the zigbee network more robust and thus presence detection more reliable.

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Thanks for the reply. I was gonna wait to see what happens when I get back home before I submit a ticket. I’ll prob just delete and add it and test some more before I do that tho

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My key fobs work for the most part. Using a Galaxy S4 was useless.

5

This might be of help:

As far as the routine not working, you might have run into this common issue:

Or it might have been another presence detection issue. (There are several.) But it’s good to know about the mode anyway.

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Thanks I’ll check that out.

I’ll try the second routine, but I was the first one home when it started. I’m home now and it kept me as home. I’m leaving soon so we’ll see what happens

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Can you check how your cell phone coverage is? I have noticed that sometimes when cell phone coverage is poor, the GPS position tends to fluctuate which causes inaccurate triggers. One thing you can also try is expanding you geo fence a little more and make sure that the WiFi radio on your phone always remains ON.

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I deleted and added it again yesterday after it failed 4x to see me come or go. It worked fine this morning. I’m thinking it was the use of the app that shuts down data and WiFi when phone isn’t in use. Hopefully that was it. I had to bring my geofence in from the default because the stores I go to almost daily are so close that they were in the default circle

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This might be of interest as well:

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I went by that post as well. I read all I could find to troubleshoot before I posted. I’m hoping it was just the app I was using. Went ahead and created a separate arrival routine for myself just in case. It detected me leave this morning.

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You can also try the Life360 integration. It’s not perfect either by any means, but it works well enough for my wife and I. I think everyone finds what presence solution works best for them, but there is no consensus on it. Some people swear they are all broken :wink:.

Add the Rule Builder and Trigger Happy smart apps to start experimenting with things you can do. They were developed by a community member. It provides an easy and flexible way to create logic based rules which the native Smartthings app is sorely lacking.

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Is that where you have to go through the browser to add them ? Right now I’m using notify me and smart home monitor. Pretty sure they both do the same thing though.

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Thanks that helped. I new the issues were on my end. I need to keep data on and give it a run.