Add delay to presence?

[smurfgun]

Hi all,

I’ve tried searching a bit but I believe most people have the opposite problem I am going to ask about. Because the location accuracy of my phone (500ft), I have my SHM changing modes to HOME simply by driving by a nearby busy street. Because of the huge radius of the presence sensor, I would like to add a delay before it senses presence. Is there a way to add a delay? Maybe 30 seconds. So, if I was just driving by the home (a few blocks away for that matter), it won’t change SHM modes.

Thanks!

[kahilzinger]

Have you tried narrowing the range in the app by lowering the diameter of the circle around your home?

[smurfgun]

It’s already at the smallest radius… It’s limited to 500ft because of the phone.

[JDRoberts]

Your post was a little confusing because you seem to have mixed up smart home monitor armed status and modes. These are actually two different things.
The following thread should clear up that confusion (this is a clickable link)

FAQ: Armed/Disarmed states vs Away/Home modes confusion

Hello, I’m brand new to SmartThings, and I’m trying to configure Smart Home Monitor to alert not just on door open/close sensors and motion sensors, but also on certain vibration sensors when it is in the Armed state. I can’t find a way to do that. I can use Custom to make a vibration alert based on Away/Home/Night “modes”, but these appear to be totally separate from the Armed/Disarmed states. Am I missing something?

In either case, The usual way would be to use webcore and have it change the smart home monitor armed status (or the Mode, or both) with presence +30 seconds. It’s a little complicated to set up, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you.

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. :dog::blush: [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

Another alternative which may be available to you, depending on the specific router that you are using, is to have your phone counted as present when it connects to your own Wi-Fi rather than using GPS. This would likely give you a smaller detection zone. See the following thread for more details on this option:

FAQ: The Many Ways of Detecting Presence

Presence, regardless of the device you use, is one of those features that works great for some people, not at all for other people, and is randomly flaky for still others. It’s very much affected by local conditions. So some people will find that phone presence works much better than the SmartThings-branded presence sensor. Other people will find the reverse. Still other people, myself included, find that they have to use a combination of two devices in order to get reliable presence indication. So if this feature tends to work differently for different people, where do you start? Using a Smart Phone as a Presence Indicator [image] Well, since most people who have SmartThings have a smart phone, it’s worth starting there. The following FAQ runs through the the usual troubleshooting…

[smurfgun]

Thanks @JDRoberts! This is helpful. For what it’s worth, I do understand the difference between the arm status and mode. I do see I used the term “mode” quite generally. oops. Regardless of arm status or mode, the post was really about how I can delay presence sensing or decrease the detection zone. I had a glance through “The many ways of detecting presence”. It seems a lot of tricks are played… I’ll have to review in more detail and think about what would work best for me. Presence detect with WiFi seems okay… But I don’t always have WiFi enabled… Maybe best to leave it as is…

[JDRoberts]

You can also do it with a daisy-chain as long as you’re OK with setting a delay in one minute instead of 30 seconds

1. have presence being detected flip a virtual Switch

2. have the virtual switch automatically turn itself off after 1 minute using the power allowance feature in official smart lighting automations

3. have the virtual switch turning off then trigger whatever it was that you wanted to have happen when presence is detected.

Although it’s a somewhat different use case, if you read the how to article in the community – created wiki on creating a virtual timer for light, it covers the steps that you would need. It’s just that one has a light come on when the virtual Device comes on and in your case you don’t want to do anything when the virtual device comes on, you just want to have something happen when the virtual device goes off.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_create_a_virtual_timer_for_a_light

As you noticed, the official smart lighting feature will only let you set a minimum of one minute. If you want to make it shorter than that, then we’re back to web core.

[Navat604]

Another way to narrow down the radius is by pinning down the radius and drag it away from the nearby street. This will give you a smaller radius on that location.

[johnahesch]

Use webCoRE to create a delay in changing modes based on presence.

[smurfgun]

Thanks @Navat604. I did drag away from the street a bit… Obviously I didn’t drag it far enough away because its still detecting presence. With that said, it’s possible I should just move the pin some more. I was hesitant to move the pin too far because now I am literally moving presence by a couple streets in the other direction.

[smurfgun]

Thanks @JDRoberts and @johnahesch. I installed webCoRE last night and played with it a bit. I’ve already switched a Smart Lighting automation over to a piston so I can set a timer that’s less than 1 minute.

I may look into that to make presence activate only after 15-30s…