First attempts to get geo-fencing to work

I need your guidance on geo-fencing, which I’m only just starting to look at. I’ve got some lighting automations that trigger approaching sunset if my location is set to Home. I assumed this was all working until I thought I’d test it by creating a simple automation to send me an alert whenever my mode changes to Away. Turns out, it never does. I’ve got “get your location from this phone” switched to on in the settings. ST has access to my location Always. Is there something else I need to do to get geo-fencing working? In Manage Location, its set to my location (not my address because Apple doesnt have my street in Maps yet).

It rather sounds like you aren’t aware that it is down to you to set the location modes. Home, Away and Night are just three suggested default modes. Historically they were used in the sample ‘Hello Home’ automations (better known as ‘Routines’).

Apologies if that isn’t the case as there is more than one way of interpreting your words. Another would be that the mobile presence sensing just isn’t working, which is not unheard of.

I understand manually setting the modes, which I deliberately have not been doing because I was expecting the mobile presence sensing to automatically adjust the mode from home to away and vice-versa. Have I misunderstood, misconfigured or both when it comes to mobile presense sensing?

You allowed the sensor to set presence but then you still manually need to create the automation to tell it what to do when you arrive/depart. Because what you may want it to may be very different than what I want it to do.

For Instance I actually have 10 location modes. Whichbone should be set when I arrive? The system has no idea unless I tell it through automation.

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Ok, now I’m understanding it - thank you Nathan. I need to setup an automation to set my mode to Away using my presense to determine this is the case. The logic in my other automations then follow based on my mode. Thanks!

The location modes are just a setting associated with your ST ‘location’ that you can use like a global variable with ‘Home’, ‘Away’ and ‘Night’ being preconfigured values. They have no inherent meaning. The legacy app included sample Routines that interpreted and set the modes such that Home indicated an occupied home, Away an unoccupied home that might perhaps need security systems to be fully armed, and Night a house where the occupants were sleeping and some intruder detection might be useful.

Your ST location can be associated with a geolocation (position and radius). For a home installation it is typical to set the geolocation for the home, but it can be anything you like, it is just a geolocation.

The mobile presence in the SmartThings app will work with the geolocation defined in the current SmartThings location. It you are inside the radius it sets its ‘presence’ attribute as ‘present’. It can also set an ‘occupancy’ attribute to ‘occupied’ but it has not been documented under what circumstances that happens. It is up to you to decide what, if anything, that means to your mode settings, and then up to you to create an automation to set them appropriately. In my case I don’t take any action based on mobile presence.

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