Mobile Presence Issues?

[JDRoberts]

You will find many discussions in the forums about presence detection using both phones and the Zigbee fob. Both work well for some people, both have problems for some people, some find one better than the other, but it varies which one.

SmartThings Presence Sensor Device--Working Well for Anyone?

Continuing the discussion from Introduce Yourself!: @camanokid , Welcome to the forums! I pulled out the presence sensor question because I’m sure it will generate a lot of comments. One my favorite sayings is “all home automation is local.” Which means what works at my house might not work at yours and certainly what I would like to see work at my house might not be what you would like to see work at yours. The smart things Zigbee presence sensor works very well for some people, not at all for others, and somewhere in the middle for still others. It’s using a different technology than a phone presence sensor, which can be good or bad depending on the exact set up at your house. RANGE: 500 FEET MINIMUM OR 50 FEET MAXIMUM? The most obvious difference, is range. Because the ph…

There are a lot of things you can do to try and improve the situation. I ultimately ended up using two devices working together but it took several months of trial and error to get everything the way I wanted.

A dual device approach to geopresence for smaller areas (sequential detection)

Continuing the discussion from Smart Presence Sensor randomly "leaving" and "returning": Battery life is fine on my presence fob, but I still get random drop-offs with both the fob and the phone presence. Using an idea from @DigitalM0nkey , I am changing over the way I use presence sensing for all activities. I’m now using dual devices at the geo-fence barrier, as well as a virtual presence sensor for better continuous occupancy indication. Basically I’m trying both reduce the range and improve reliability by using two devices that will be recognized in sequence rather than both at the same time. So this is how it will work at my house now: Smartthings recognizes that my phone or the fob, mainly the fob , has entered the Geo fenced area. but nothing else happens yet. I do not tri…

I am happy now. Presence detection was one of the things I wanted from smartthings to begin with, and now it is working. But it was sort of a twisty road to get here.