Any New Presence Sensor Device

I ordered two of the mini plugs to see if they work as expected.

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I currently have Homebridge 2.0 set up, and have my “home” virtual switched controlled by Homekit as I arrive home. That has worked 100% of the time.

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Is home bridge another services that runs on another physical device? > home bridge.io

Homebridge is software that I run on a Rhaspberry Pi, and use Homebridge 2.0 smart app to connect smartthings to it, and it connects to Homekit.

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iOS 15.3 is now available so give it a try

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Homebridge is software that started out life as a Philips hue bridge emulator. It works by using that emulator to fool HomeKit into thinking that other types of devices are hue bulbs. (Seriously, that’s how it works.)

Over the years many different people have contributed different Homebridge “plug-ins“ that are software that convert the messages from other kinds of devices, everything from Ring doorbells to smartthings hubs.

You can run the software on your own device, typically a raspberry pi. Or in the last two years you can buy a hardware device that comes with the basic homebridge software already installed. HOOBS is probably the most popular of these.

It’s important to note that Hoobs is not itself a hub. It can’t talk directly to a Zigbee device or a Z wave device. It’s receiving messages from the smartthings cloud service. Then it’s converting those messages, using the plug-ins, into something that HomeKit will recognize.

Note that many of these integrations are one way: you could, for example, bring devices attached to a smart things hub into the HomeKit app, but you couldn’t bring devices that communicate with HomeKit back into the smartthings app.

So it’s useful for some people, not others, it just depends on what you want to do with it.

HOOBS makes it sounds like it’s as easy to use as the app for consumer devices like ring: it’s not. The plug-ins are pretty technical and they can need some tinkering to get them to work.

https://hoobs.com/

Home bridge is definitely an option for some people, but setting it up it’s probably overkill if all you want is reliable home/away indication from an iOS phone/tablet.

Also… right now the smartthings homebridge integration depends on groovy and the smartthings groovy implementation is going away pretty soon. And so far I haven’t heard of anyone who’s volunteered to rewrite it for the new architecture. :thinking:

You can talk to people who are using it in the following thread:

[RELEASE] Homebridge SmartThings v2.0

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Thanks for the detailed information. As I get older, I’m looking for simplicity in my life and starting to get reid of things that are more aggravating than they are worth. Which is somewhat my thoughts on Smartthings. If I have to spend more time fixing something then the time required to turn on a light, is it really worth it?

I don’t want to set up anther device to make two other things works. I will give the plug option a try and maybe the IOS will keep that their on app checking alive. We will see. I will also update the IOS too.

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Will do! Thanks

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I know this thread is mainly about iOS, but Android users could do something broadly along the lines described by setting up homes/households in Google Home with the Home/Away setting based on single phones. However it may just reveal that some SmartThings presence issues are actually Google geofence issues.

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This morning when she got to work she was still showing at home. I had her open WebCoRE and instantly it should her she left.

She has been home for an hour and it shows her still away. Right now I am doing the 15.3 update to see if the reboot automatically sets her at home.

The reboot automatically put her home. We will see what tomorrow holds.

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Today her cell phone presence worked. Was it the upgrade? Who knows. Let’s see what tomorrow holds.

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Well day two, still working. I can not believe it……

Jdroberts. I also got the outlet in and working the the home kit app. I also have it in smart things and when she came home the outlet came on. So I’ll monitor these for a while and see which is the first to stop working.

Was the new iOS update suppose to have some fix for apps going to sleep or something. I’m surprised if that was the fix.

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Wow, still working. Amazing :star_struck:

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Well this evening is the first time her WebCoRE presence did not work. However the home kit plug still detected her arriving. This was the first time that proved HomeKit more reliable for presence detection.

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This is an excellent idea. I just bought the 3 plug power strip, I installed it, I upgraded the firmware, I added it to the homekit and it seemed to work fine.
Unfortunately after a few hours, the power button light started to flash and in the homekit and Meross app appears greyed out. It is just a few feet from the router.
If it is going to be like that in the future to be necessary to reconnect daily, I will send it back to Amazon. I wanted to set my automation based on my home presence, but it has to be reliable.
Did you have any problems with the Meross plugs?

Did you make the working? Are they reliable, don’t they disconnect?

I’ve been using Meross plugs for about two years now, and have several power strips which are at least a year old and they’ve all been very reliable for me. It sounds like you might just have gotten a bad unit, it can happen with any electrical device. :thinking:

It has been working great for us since Feb.

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The Meross plugs have now stopped working as a presence device option. Worked great for a long time now it is not automatically updating with out going in and refresh the device. Notified smart things and they recommended unlinking meross and re-link back. That worked for a while and then broke again. A Presence device is just so undependable.

Anyone else having trouble with your meross plugs status refreshing in SmartThings.

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