Presence Sensor battery upgrade

I see what you mean
but isn’t it true that if smartthings detects the phone as present when you’re close to home, the arrival sensor inside your car will also be detected as present as well. your piston says car isn’t present!!
unless phone presence vs arrival sensor aren’t handled the same way, the phone is always detected as presence first (farther away from home) compared to the arrival sensor!?

This is one of those things that IMO would be nice… but I can’t push a button when I enter my driveway to open the garage? My pushbuttons to operate the chamberlain garage opener actually have a range of nearly 150 yards, so I press the button when I’m two houses away and it’s open by the time I get to the driveway. By the time I’ve pulled in etc, the ST presence sensor has made itself known and the door unlocks for me.

That said, it’s a cool automation and worthy of continued effort to get to work correctly.

Yeah I think in the end it’s a matter of convenience… you can certainly push a button to open / close the door, just like you can push a button to turn on /off a light, or walk over and adjust the thermostat. :slight_smile:

Hey you can fiddle around with the code to try to make it work whichever way it suits your situation. In my case, my driveway is nearly 400 feet long, so my phone is detected as being inside the geofence a long time before the hub gets the signal from the arrival sensor – hence, the phone arrives before the car sensor does.

With that said, you can fiddle with global booleans to try to get the desired result. I’ve tried this approach too and it seems to keep my presence from bouncing around – although like I said, I haven’t fiddled with automatically opening / unlocking anything.

Ok makes sense now
I also noticed that geofence is kind of wide even when you try to make it the smallest possible, basically the radius comprises 4 houses before it reaches my home, not sure if it’s designed like this for any reason!
What I don’t understand is why phone presence is detected way before the arrival sensor is detected. anyway I’ll try to play with settings when I get the arrival sensor

I think your confusion comes from the fact you’re treating both devices as equal.

The arrival sensor is zigbee and talks directly to the hub (or through a repeater to the hub), saying “here I am and here’s my battery level” basically.

Your phone uses its own location services to figure out where it is, and relays that information to ST via the internet. The size of the geofence determines when the phone is “home” and you can shrink it if you want, but it has nothing to do with the arrival sensor determining if it’s home – it’s all based on whether or not it’s in range of the hub.

If you want to test it out, set your geofence as big as you want and take your arrival sensor and walk out of the house for 100 feet or so. It doesn’t matter how far the geofence extends, the sensor is only present as long as the hub can talk to it.

Makes sense now
Phone is detected via internet and based on that geofence.
Arrival sensor is detected when it’s close to mesh and can talk to hub
How close to the door the the arrival sensor may get detected by the hub? Thinking of adding one to my daughter backpack which will trigger garage door to open when the bus drops her off
Sorry I know we are hijacking the thread

I used this one - worked out great.

Pink Lizard 4 X AA Battery Holder Case Enclosed Box OFF/ON Switch With Wires https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HMF52SK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_chPrCbKNG87ZB

Seems like the sensors are not too happy about the current cold spell, regardless of the battery level.

The high today in my neck of the woods was 12 degrees, and it’s currently 35 in the garage, and although the cars haven’t moved, both sensors has been flipping around all day.

19 minutes ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left
23 minutes ago    DEVICE        presence    present        Arrival Sensor BMW has arrived
53 minutes ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left
55 minutes ago    DEVICE        presence    present        Arrival Sensor BMW has arrived
1 hour ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left
2 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    present        Arrival Sensor BMW has arrived
2 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left
2 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    present        Arrival Sensor BMW has arrived
2 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left
2 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    present        Arrival Sensor BMW has arrived
2 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left
6 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    present        Arrival Sensor BMW has arrived
6 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left
6 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    present        Arrival Sensor BMW has arrived
8 hours ago    DEVICE        presence    not present        Arrival Sensor BMW has left

any recommendations on a 2 X AA Battery Holder Case Enclosed Box, looking to use it on my smartthings multipurpose sensors

You can’t beat physics. Batteries have less flow in the cold. Batteries that are not fresh will have more issues. Might be a good moment to replace the batteries in your car sensor.

True. However, I get this issue with fresh batteries in the warm. I think the ST presence sensor is particularly susceptible to Wi-Fi interference. Interestingly, I do not have any interference issues with my other Zigbee battery devices. But the presence sensor definitely has issues - maybe it just has a very weak radio. I initially thought it improved when I did this battery mod but it really did not. It can be stable for days then it does this again. There’re actually many reports in the community relating to this.

I just got my arrival sensors. Didn’t mod it yet, still 100% battery. I noticed when I leave home. They don’t change status to away even though I’m like 500 feet away. Is that normal? Will this get improved with the battery modification? People say it’s been rock solid but I’m not sure why it’s not reporting accurate presence for me
Any thoughts

Did you fiddle with the sensor timeouts?

If anything, this should be the first thing to be marked as “away” because of how the interaction works.

No I didn’t. How/what do you change play with timeout? And where?
Thx

I believe you can do it in the ST app itself, but you can also do it via the IDE by editing the device preferences.

This is probably why they call them ‘arrival’ sensors these days. They attempt to contact the hub every thirty seconds. If they succeed then they are shown as ‘present’. If they fail to contact the hub for a given timeout period they are ‘not present’. That timeout (I have seen written this is in the device settings for newer devices, but certainly it uses the hub presence timeout in the IDE for older ones) defaults to two minutes. It depends on where you are on the thirty second cycle when you depart, the contact range for your sensor, and your mode of transport, but I’d say 500 feet is perfectly normal, even modest. When walking I’d expect ‘not present’ to be detected about the same time it would be with phone presence on the smallest range. In a car it could be a good half a mile away. Increase the timeout and you could easily be miles away.

1 Like

my bad, I meant to say 500 yards (definitely not feet)
per Samsung

The Arrival Sensor’s default presence timeout is 2 minutes. The Connect Home pings for the arrival sensor every 20 seconds. Once the arrival sensor misses six pings (2 minute default), the Connect Home will report the sensor as Away (to avoid false departure events in the case of incorrectly missed pings).
if I’m correct, if 6 pings are missed (2 min) >> sensor is changed to away. now how about when the sensor responds to the next ping when it’s close to home, I guess sensor is set immediately to present right?
so timeout only changes the moving from present to away state, increasing time out will delay the away state
time out will never expedite or delay the moving from away to present
correct me if I’m wrong

In my experience, I’ve seen the sensor marked as away when it misses less than 6 pings. Then again, I’ve seen it leave / arrive almost immediately and I’ve seen it ping more frequently than 20 seconds based on what I see on the logs.

It’s some kind of dark voodoo magic from what I can tell, which is what makes it harder to troubleshoot.

1 Like

so what do u recommend to use as a timeout? default is 2 min.