Ability to Select Certain Devices for geo location?

I’m not sure if it is already possible to do this:

I have an automation set up to turn the Away from Home flag on when all devices have left the geofence area.

I have three iOS devices running SmartThings. Two of them are iphones I want to use to trigger this automation. The other device is an iPad that stays home all the time. Therefore, I did not set up it with location services on and also the “use this tablet to determine location” in the app settings is turned off. My thinking is that with this turned off, the SmartThings app will exclude this tablet for determining the away from home status. However, it doesn’t seem to work.

Am I missing something here or should this be a feature request to be able to select which devices to use to determine when an automation is triggered?

That is correct… with get Location for this iPad disabled, the iPad would not be used. Two things come to mind….

  1. your presence sensors are not working correctly on your iPhones
  2. or issues with Routine. You may want to post a screenshot (if possible) of your Routine that is used when Presence sensors are all away from Home. Please blackout any data on it you do not wish to share such as names, etc

Hopefully others will help you get it sorted out.

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That setting certainly determines whether the app on the tablet is enabled to act as a presence sensor or not. In your Routine you get to select which of your devices are being used and the tablet shouldn’t be offered to you. However even if it were still enabled you get to select the devices.

I don’t find the app’s rather naive approach to ‘Member Location’ very helpful. It would be much better if it emphasised the devices, instead of assuming the Samsung account name represents the exclusive user of the device.

Perhaps you could show us how the Routine has been set up so we can see how it should be working and better advise you? It may be perfectly correct and it may just be that the geofencing isn’t reliable for you.

I did notice you said ‘all devices have left the geofence area’. Does that mean you always carry both iPhones without fail?

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I have two routines set up. One for when all devices (two iPhones in this case) have left the geofence area. If triggered, it sets the location to Away. This routine doesn’t work. I have attached a screen shot to show the routine.

The other routine is set up to run if any of my iPhones are within the geofence area. In this case, it sets the location to Home. This routine runs fine all the time. Therefore I know the geofence works.

are both iPhones logged in under your account with the ST app? or is the second logged in with another user account?

Both are logged into the same account

To me it sounds like only one phone is working on the geofence but I’m not not really clear how you are using them.