I had been using WebCORE to trigger a virtual switch to turn off Home Monitor whenever someone returned home (the old “I’m Back!” routine). Since WebCORE is going away, and assuming Smartthings does not allow an automation to turn off HM (the reason I went to WebCORE in the first place), what options do I have now? Thanks in advance.
What you might be thinking of is that the STHM is not exposed outside of ST. However, you can change the STHM state i.e. Disarm, Arm Away, Arm Stay with a Routine. So you can use a virtual switch or SmartThings presence to arm and disarm.
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Thanks for that and great to hear! Things have been running so well over the years, I haven’t been keeping up on the latest developments. I’ll give it a try later today!
Okay follow-up question… I’m not sure it matters but does “Any phone AT home” mean when the phone arrives or will it be able to ping a phone to know that it’s “currently” home? I ask because if the virtual switch ever missed an arrival, it would not update until the phone left the geofence perimeter and re-entered. Thanks!
I only have one phone on my account so I cannot speak to the ANY. People have had varying experiences and success with the built-in presence detection.
I have two locations. The arm away when I leave works flawlessly. Same thing for one location when arriving. For the other, the presence detection takes longer than I would like so I wind up manually disarming. My sense is that it eventually realizes you are home. I don’t think you have to re-cross the geofence. That is just my sense from the delay, however.
I include a notification with my arms and disarms so I will know if the routine ran. I also have something that I can see before I enter the house, that only activates if the system is disarmed. So I can tell if the system has disarmed based on my presence without checking notifications on my phone.
In my experience it’s whenever the device enters or leavea the Geofence. If the device is off when it enters the Geofence and then is turned on inside the Geofence it doesn’t always update it’s self correctly. Your mileage may vary.
It is considering the current value of the presence for each mobile presence device, triggered by one of the devices reporting a change. So if you have two phones it can mean either phone has just arrived, or one has just departed but one remains.
Arrival or departure is determined by the phone’s location services telling the SmartThings app that a geofence boundary has been crossed and the app successfully passing that to the cloud. If that isn’t successful then the presence will be incorrect. Sadly there don’t seem to be any mechanisms for sanity checking.
With 2 or more phones being used for arming/disarming…
For arming: “All phones and tablets away from home”
For disarming: “Any phone or tablet at home”
This has been working fine for me.
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