I have been looking at a smart home security system that does the following :
You install door sensors and maybe some motion sensors
Them sensors then get activated when a user leaves their house with their mobile phone using geo fencing,
If an occupant is still inside the house which are also part of the geofencing setup then the sensors stay deactivated.
Also when one of the occupants return to the house the sensors automatically deactivate .
At at night-time despite the occupants being at home i would like the sensors to activate on a timed schedule. Say 10pm - 5am.
Can Smart things do all of this ? I looked at Hive but it looked like it required a lot of manual turning off of notifications etc which would be a pain ! .
Yes, all of that (and frankly much more) is possible - it really all depends on your coding skills, or at least your willingness to learn some.
I have set up Apts with very similar setups, and I kinda have something like that setup at my place: Motion and contact sensors trigger lights on only when someone is home (using ST Presence sensors as I’ve found then to be waaaay more reliable than phone geofencing) - which prevents the cat from turning lights on while on patrol for varmits. If no one is home, then opening a contact sensor triggers alarm, causes video to be taken, etc. All of the actions / nonactions take place without any interaction from me (barring any ST server issues, which occur relatively infrequently)
We use phones for geofencing/presence and have had no issues (very reliable). I think reliability for phones may be related use patterns and subsequently GC. You do need to use WiFi at home, otherwise the location services get a little shaky if you bounce between towers (triangulation could bounce you outside the geofence when using cellular data). As for ST presence, some people swear by them and others swear at them. So I guess no perfect, guaranteed solution exists, but typically one will work for you (I’d start with the phone, you already have that). Anyway, I leverage presence quite a bit with no issues. The only issue that I can foresee is there have been lots of phantom events triggering false motion since the last firmware update, so reliability at this point in time may be somewhat suspect with respect to motion, however I have not seen the issue with contact sensors.
You can use the Life 360 connect if you don’t want full access to SmartThings on others phones.
I have done this with mine and my wife’s mobile, so we know where each other are, and also linked it with routines to arm and disarm the alarms.
Hi all, I find that good geo fencing is all about the quality of your mobile phone signal around your home location. I’m a network field engineer for one of the big mobile phone company’s so I know a bit about call quality and data rates on your mobile.
If your signal on your phone is on 2G /gprs when at home then forget it the data isn’t fast enough to send back to the internet. If you have a good 3G hsdpa or 4G/Lte signal then you should be fine. I have found that iPhones have better results then Android (not sure why)
Both my wife and myself have iPhones, I live in a small close and my house is 20mtr at the top of the close. The ring around my location is set to the entrance to the close and by the time I have driven the 20mtr up the road my SHM is disarmed as I am pulling on the drive, it has been rock solid for nearly a year with no false triggers coming or going. The only time it goes wrong is when my wife forgets to take her phone out or lets the battery on the phone run down whilst out, but that’s all down to human error😀
, just waiting for a similar deal to arrive .