ST seems to use a combo of wifi and cell for location reporting. ST should consider only using wifi. I have used other zwave control software that allowed for getting the arp table from my router to determine what devices are connected or not. Way more reliable then what looks like ST is doing to determine location.
Your geofence diameter should allow for a small location for us city users.
Geofence is not small enough for city users. ios app report 561 feet. Quite large for a city user in a condo. That’s the smallest I can make it. Needs to be around 50-100 feet.
561 feet isn’t small enough? If you made it 50-100 feet the you would leave and retunr to the geofence alllllll the time. It impractical.
Accuracy is generally within 10 meters for GPS on iOS and Android. Tthats 32 feet roughly. Unless you were exactly in the center of your gofence and your geofence was setup to be exactly in the middle of your home its be impossible to be inside that geofence all the time.
Unfortuantely if you live in the city you’re geofence will always be “to big” because it needs to be larger than 300 ft to be practical.
This is where the “wifi presence” would work great.
You can find posts on here about using ifttt for presence sensing. It is a hack job but it worked for a lot of people. I never tried it though
+1 ST needs to be able to detect a wifi device connected to your home to trigger presence, this would give people another option. I ended up purchasing Presence devices because both Android and iOS were not accurate or fast enough.
With iBeacon you could get 2-3 m resolution. That’s enough to figure out what room you’re in. If the ST app supported iBeacons that would solve most presence problems.
Maybe it’s cause I’m an old fart, but generally speaking, when I get home my cellphone gets dropped on the counter along with my keys and other items that I carry with me when going out.
At times when I’m home I’ll have my phone on me (like on a days I expect calls, or when I’m reading a book or playing a game), but more often than not I’m not carrying my phone around the house with me. So having this level of resolution (iBeacon I mean) seems meaningless, to me. Now obviously this would still be fine to saying if I’m inside my home or not, regardless of if I’m upstairs and the phone is downstairs.
But on the flip side of things, is the iBeacon range large enough that it would register me as home before I entered the house? Right now with my presence sensor in my car I usually start to see the garage door open when one or two lots from my house. Sometimes it just trigger until I’m in my driveway, but that’s rare. When would iBeacon report that I’m home and open my garage?