Will look into this, thanks!
Thank you! I’m going to try this out. And thanks to @TAustin for his excellent drivers.
For iOS users…
At our house, we find that HomeKit presence is reliable and smartthings presence is not.
So we use a physical device which is visible to both platforms as a proxy. We turn it on in HomeKit, and then it shows up as being on in smartthings, and we can trigger routines from that.
No custom code is required, and you don’t need to have a SmartThings/aeotec hub.
So it’s a very simple, straightforward method, although you do need to buy an additional physical device.
We use the meross power strip, which gives us four individual sockets, to use as proxies. It may even be useful to you as a smartplug if there’s one that you want on whenever you’re home and off whenever you leave.
Anyway, here’s a how-to article I wrote about that method if it’s of any interest:
How to Use a Meross Plug to Use HomeKit Presence to Trigger ST Routines
The biggest advantage to this approach is how simple it is to set up.
What a great idea - presence sensing has never been great for me using a ST hub and Google Home. What is everyone’s suggestions on the best way to get this going with:
Android Phones
ST Hub
Google Home
Phillips Hue
TP Link Deco Mesh system
I have had a look through each, GH and ST aren’t reliable and I have tried all the settings etc. Hue seems accurate however lacks customisable routines. I can trigger a automation when a phone connects ton the Deco WIFI however can only control things connected and visible in the Deco app. I can’t see a way to import virtual devices into Deco.
Next best thing I can see is to trigger a routine when a TP Link Smart switch does something (after the phone connects to deco WIFI). Only issues is that I use all the smart switches already and worried they won’t maintain their previous state after a phone connects to the WIFI.
I have tested the automation by using deco app to turn on a tapo smart plug when my phone connected to the wifi. (So I can create another automation in smartthings app to trigger arrive or leave home based on tapo smart plug status.)
I can confirm that it worked, but there was a liitle glitch last night. If my phone (s23 ultra) was inactivity for a while, the deco app thought that my phone has lost a connection to wifi. Later that an automation in smartthings has been running leave home.
I tried to figure it out but I can’t find the cause. So now I switched it back to location service in smartthings.
Have you try delete "after being away for … " ?
I thought that condition was not reliable.
Hey sirbirus - thanks for your help. Il give that a go and I might use the deco as a backup.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Cheers!
Hello, sorry if this is not related, but for some reason my Edge virtual devices keep going on and off and I have not left the house. My routines keep firing and my location has not changed. Seems the location of members in ST stop working a few days ago and now my routines are telling me I’m away and then returning and nothing has change with my location.
I’m sure others with chime in, but SmartThings’s cellphone-based location triggers are notoriously unreliable. There are some standard things you can try like turning off and back on location services, or logging out and back in to your SmartThings app to see if it helps.
I’d recommend searching the community for related discussions, as this is not specific to the vEdge driver.
Thank you. What do you recommend that’s more reliable then ST cellphone based location. The funny thing is that life360 is mostly always accurate but that has been gone for a long while.
Thanks again
This is a good question, but off topic for the thread where you were posting, which is dedicated to the VEdge creator edge driver. So I have moved it to a recent thread on presence. Please go up to the top of this thread and read those comments, and then hopefully others will respond to your question as well.
Apologies forgot to get back to everyone - works perfectly now.
Does anyone know how to trigger Google Home presence sensing with ST location?
Is it even possible? I’ve got presence sending routines working in ST but can’t trigger my nest cams to turn on and off based on st presence. Google home is very inflexible on this area. I’m assuming they haven’t opened up their API for this?
I’m not aware of any way to do it, but I can see it might be useful as Google Home presence sensing is bonkers. It can work beautifully but it can also take hours for an arrival to be registered and it can spontaneously assume departure based on inactivity even when it has no devices that are detecting activity and no one has left, let alone everyone. When using speakers to help detect presence it doesn’t check for specific voices.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one with these issues! The integration between the old nest app and google is just poorly implemented.
Hoping it will be fixed soon but not holding my breath.
If I change to home assistant can you still trigger google devices and routines with voice without bringing them into HA?
I did it by adding a second home for each family member, creating a virtual device on the ST, and then setting the home or away status for each user.
I do that to use Google Home Home/Away to help set an individual’s presence on ST. I think @Ben_Johnson1 wants to do it the other way around and use the presence on ST to set the Home/Away on Google.
So my apologies, my bad English made me wrong, sorry.
I don’t recommend using ST for triggering geolocation-based automations. My away routines are setup in the opposite way, and are now 100% reliable as compared to using ST’s presence sensing. Since GH doesn’t yet recognize virtual presence device types, I’ve created a vEdge Switch and named it ‘Virtual Presence’, then rely on GH for presence sensing to toggle the vEdge Switch which ST acts upon its state.
Thanks Dennis - funnily enough I’m the exact opposite. ST geo based is rock solid for me but GH isn’t. Takes ages to recognise when someone is home or just decided no one is home due to inactivity even though devices are still home.
I setup a virtual presence sensor in smart things that triggered when phone connected to wifi but realised I didn’t need it as the geo based ones were working so well.
Just can’t get ST to tell GH I’m home vie this presence sensor. It’ll run routines but the only way I can see to turn on or off nest cams is through the GH presence sensing routine.