Alternatives to the Samsung Arrival Sensor?

Thanks for the info. I never heard of ibeacon. I’ll need to check it out.

If you have keypad door locks you could have him use his own keycode and use that as a check in to trigger notifications form webcore or however you need. Lock manager will set user code notification usage by default.

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That’s actually a very good suggestion in my case, since we do have a Z-Wave keypad. Thanks!

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I’ve doing exactly the same as you I’ve set up a WebCore piston to alert us when my son’s home from school.
But like you say they are hit and miss it can go days without any problems and then change every hour :frowning:
I’ve ended up putting a restriction on the piston to half hour each way of when I know my son’s due home.

I wish there was a way to have the ST Hub determine presence by whether a smartphone is connected or not connected to my home’s WiFi network. I’ve read a few postings where people have done this, but they are installing scripts that are running on certain WiFi routers and I don’t have that option with my Nighthawk router.

You could probably do that using tasker.
I do exactly similar with tasker to turn my WiFi and adjust my phones volume levels automatically when I get to work and when I get home.
So maybe link that to a virtual switch within SmartThings ?

Yes, I probably could use Tasker on my Android phone, but my son and wife use iPhones. :frowning:

Plus an Iphone will disconnect from the wifi when it goes to sleep. I was using a routine on a tablet to ping phones in my house to detect presence.
My android would stay connected but the Iphones would drop off, then reconnect when they started using it.

ST offers only:

  • geo-fence based on mobiles and to be honest, recently they fail big time, whatever Android or IPhone.
  • arrival sensors you also concluded are not reliable. I guess they should rename them stay sensor rather than arrival as they fairly work when they stay in your hub area, good battery life. But if you happen to spend 8 hours outside a day, the autonomy just get ruined in few weeks and the detection is anyway inaccurate.

So I would rather go for a wifi device of any type and an IFTTT associated setup that pings an event when it connects to your wifi network, It will additionally have larger range than your arrival sensor.

Or this :wink:

So I would rather go for a wifi device of any type and an IFTTT associated setup that pings an event when it connects to your wifi network, It will additionally have larger range than your arrival sensor.

Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. What if I write a script that runs on my iMac (which is always turned on at home) that pings certain fixed ip addresses to determine if they are connected to my home WiFi network. Based on the response, the script would flip a virtual presence switch in the cloud for the ST hub. There’s a lot of things to work out to make this work (i.e., how to control a virtual switch from a script on my iMac), but maybe I can get this working.

Alternatively, it might be possible to do this with a Raspberry Pi WiFi-enabled board and some coding.

All the options you’ve mentioned are discussed in the presence FAQ thread linked to upthread in post 2. :sunglasses:

You can also use the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki and look in the project reports for the list for “presence” to see what other people have done.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community-Created_SmartApps_Forum_Section

The thread you linked to is two years old. You can find more up-to-date information in the presence FAQ.

Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. What if I write a script that runs on my iMac (which is always turned on at home) that pings certain fixed ip addresses to determine if they are connected to my home WiFi network.

Ok, I just tested this idea on my iMac by running the terminal command “arp -a” which gives a list of connected devices to my WiFi network. The output is IP addresses and MAC addresses, however, I noticed that only currently connected devices show up in the list. For example, my Android tablet and Android LG G6 smartphone do not show as connected if they are sitting idle on my desk. I have to run the email app or a browser on those devices before they show up as connected to the WiFi network. I’m afraid that’s not a very practical solution for presence detection.

Yes they might release the connection but you should see a periodic connection and this seems more frequent than the refresh period of an arrival sensor.

I had a try with my Android phone. You can see that not every arp-scan (install it via sudo apt-get install arp-scan)

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
192.168.1.83 48:5a:3f:FF:FF:FF (Unknown)
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
192.168.1.83 48:5a:3f:FF:FF:FF (Unknown)
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet | grep “48:5a”
192.168.1.83 48:5a:3f:FF:FF:FF (Unknown)

So you might still have fair results with that mechanism.

Don’t the arrival sensors ping every 30 seconds whether or not they’re in range of the hub?

You can adjust it in the setting via IDE. I think the base is 20 sec. Here my android device reconnects more often than that like every 3 or 5 secd.

I had a lot of presence detection issues and ended up working with SmartThings support for three months trying to improve things, so I found out a lot of details about how the presence sensors work. :scream: Unless something has changed recently, the SmartThings presence sensor checks in every 30 seconds and there’s no way to change that. The presence sensor is a super simple device, in part to try to improve battery life. You can’t configure it at all.

What you can change is how long it will be before the cloud marks the presence sensor as “away” if a check in has not been received. This is intended to help with the problems of local interference or a presence sensor which at home is left right on the edge of range. The kind of situation where you will see the present sensor being marked as away, home, away, home, in rapid succession. You can make that interval longer than 30 seconds, so that if only one check in is missed The presence sensor will still be treated as at home, but you can’t make it shorter than 30 seconds because you can’t change the behavior of the presence sensor itself.

I don’t see that.

You used to be able to do that, but I just looked and I didn’t see it either. Support can do it for you. It’s one of those things which has sometimes been there and sometimes not over the three years that I’ve had the system, I’m not sure why they change its availability. But they did make some IDE format changes a month or so ago, it may have been lost then. Or maybe I just missed it.

There is the timeout setting in the hub settings

there is a checkinterval in the device settings.

These 2 settings alter the performance of the arrival sensors and, regarding the hub setting, it also affects the geofence performance.

Yes, you are right. This only affects the ST polling aspect, not the sensor aspect.

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