Presence Using Homekit

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I know there have been a lot of issues with SmartThings and presence when it comes to using the built in presence of the SmartThings app. I also tried Life360, which worked for the most part but I had to set the radius too big and a few times Life360 would say I left about 30 seconds after I arrived so my routines wouldn’t trigger.

Anyway, I found a great solution that works for me (and my wife) so thought I would share.

First, I installed the Momentary Tile Button DTH and set my Routines to trigger when each of the corresponding buttons was pushed.

Then, using the JSON Complete API SmartApp + Homebridge running on an Ubuntu machine I added these buttons to HomeKit.

I am now using HomeKit’s “When Anyone Arrives Home” and “When The Last Person Leaves” presence options to push the corresponding button, which in turn triggers the routine in SmartThings.

I’ve found this to be a lot more reliable than relying on SmartThings presence.

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Very interesting–thanks for sharing. :sunglasses:

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BTW, another variation on this would be to have the momentary button also turn on a virtual presence sensor in SmartThings. That might allow you to extend it to even more use cases. :sunglasses:

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