Presense sensor 'app' that uses MAC address

[SplanK (Steve)]

Hi All,
I got my noggin thinking last night and the Mrs bought up the question “what happens when the baby sitter (aka mother in law!!) comes over”. I tried to explain that we could set a mode which can prevents actions being taken.

Anyway, I thought about buying a presence sensor for her, but it got me thinking… she carries a mobile around with her and that has a unique identifier when it connects to our wifi (static IP from DHCP and MAC address). I don’t want to install ST on her phone and give her access to our hub, so detection of IP and/or MAC would be the next best thing.

I have a server that runs 24/7 so I could easily write a simple app/script on my server which looks for her phone on the network, my only question is, how can I feed that information to the ST hub? Given some of the other posts I have seen, I don’t think there is an interface that will let me do this?

Alternatively, is there a way that the SmartApp could look for a device based on IP address or MAC address on the LAN and have it run every 5mins, or triggered by the front door being opened (multi sensor)?

Ta!

[PailOckenden (Paul Ockenden)]

Trouble is, many smartphones are frugal with their WiFi connections these days, dropping off the network when not in active use.

[ritchierich (Michael)]

Depending on your router, these threads may be useful:

[NEEDS UPDATING] Presence Detection using DD-WRT Router Script

Similar to many users, I wasn’t happy with the smartthings mobile app presence detection. I just moved back from a veralite which I had setup my router to run a script to toggle a virtual presence switch. That was a little easier to setup than with smartthings as there was already a good discussion thread to work off of. See: Micasaverde Forums To get this to work, you need: DD-WRT (possibly Tomato) based router to run the devices tracking script. Virtual Presence Toggle device for the router to interact with (with endpoint access) First, the virtual presence device is similar to others that have been posted. I set mine up with a virtual switch and a virtual presence tile/capabilities. This allows you to manually override or set the presence. See the following for the basic device cod…

[OBSOLETE] ASUSWRT Wifi Presence

I have created a pretty solid wifi presence solution for when my phones connect to the wifi network, its very quick to update ST. I use this alongside the ST app, Life360 & my own Tado presence device type, i use Rule machine to flip a virtual presence sensor when any of the 4 change state, this is a first past the post setup and it works really well, before i put this in presence was really an issue. this however always triggers when all the others fail to update (regularly) but the range of this is not very far, only within the wifi range (obviously!) ive seen other solutions for DD-WRT, but these don’t work with the Newer Asus routers, RT-AC87U or Newer as the command to list mac addresses with the new 5G hardware no longer uses wl ok so the first thing i did was install the latest A…

[SplanK (Steve)]

Thanks for the pointers…

I am actually happy (so far, but its only been a week!) with the ST presence in the app, however I don’t want to install and invite others into my account. Not secure for me (who knows what the MIL could get up to!), and don’t want to add battery drain.

I don’t have a router that will support running scripts, but the router side look like Linux shell scripts which I could re-write into maybe a VBS script using a 3rd party app to sniff out the MAC addresses.