Is it possible to make smartthings poll the Smartthings presence sensor more often?

Just sat in my driveway for almost 2 minutes before it realized I’m home (for clarity, it’s set so that the garage door opens on presence sense). That’s essentially a useless presence sensor. The phone does a far better job of it, was hoping that wasn’t the case.

Pollster would be amazing, but for whatever reason doesn’t seem coded to poll presence sensors. Any ideas?

This is the zigbee presence fob?

Garages can be quite difficult to get a signal through. Many people find it helps to put a zigbee repeater in the garage to boost the signal. The gen 1 motion sensor will work for this if you keep it plugged in.

Or a zigbee repeater in another front facing room near a window may help.

Note that smart bulbs mostly don’t act as repeaters except for other bulbs, but one member reports the Osram Lightify bulb does.

See this topic for more details:

I believe the devices contact the hub every 30 seconds. If the garage door didn’t open, it might be too far from the hub. The sensors have a small speaker in them. Try pressing the beep button in the thing tile for the device. It will cause the sensor to beep next time it polls. If it doesn’t, get closer to the hub.

Since garages typically have double drywall, this may just be a signal issue.

Damn, @JDRoberts…you are too quick for me!

Heh heh heh! :smile: The wheelchair does 7 mph and the voice software does 200 wpm. Just call me Flash! :zap:

Highly doubt its a signal issue, because it does record it as home eventually, without moving it further. It just takes way too long. But i’ll try that I suppose.

Edit: Nope, not the issue. Beeped within about 15 secs first time and 25 the second time. Why would it do that and then take 2 mins of sitting in my driveway to record itself as present. That’s absolutely odd.

Could still be the signal strength.

When you tap the tile, you are telling the hub to look for the Fob.

When you just drive up the driveway, the fob is looking for the hub once every 30 seconds.

The difference is that as a directed command, The first is going to likely start right away and repeat a couple of times if needed. The second is just going to happen once every 30 seconds. They both might have a little trouble getting through, but hub to fob will very likely get through faster just because it repeats more frequently.

Fobs are generally, not just this device, not set up for frequent repeats because it will drain the battery life too fast. Obviously that’s not an issue with the hub, which is plugged into the mains.

There’s another issue that has to do with the routing table, but the solution is all the same. Try a repeater, to improve the signal strength strength that the fob detects when it is doing its normal check for the hub.

Not really. I can tell you I have an original SmartThings motion sensor (USB Powered) in my garage, and signal is not an issue. When returning home, I can stop at my mailbox at the end of my driveway (80+ feet from the garage door), and usually hear my “welcome home” notification after I’ve exited my truck and gotten my mail.

But half the time I pull up to my garage door and wait like a dummy for the notification. While I do not have SmartThings set up to automatically open the door (not enough trust for that), I must wait to get the notification to know my alarm mode has been dismissed.

While two minutes might seem a little extreme, I think it has been that long occasionally. I attribute the behavior to typical SmartThings latency, which comes and goes many times a day. I seriously doubt there will be a cure until the new hub arrives.

1 Like

Has the new hub helped this situation? Else, did a repeater help?

And I was just going to head out to Best Buy and buy a ST presence sensor . Maybe I should hold off ???

As long as you can return it without a restocking fee, there’s no reason not to try it.

It works very well for a lot of people. It’s just that it doesn’t work for a fair number of people. It depends very much on local conditions.

But I don’t expect anything to change with it anytime soon in the future unless They do something different for The TV-based version. It is what it is.