[OBSOLETE] Reliable Presence SmartApp

I don’t have anything additional set up on my aging WiFI router. The IFTTT recipe is triggered on my Android Device as it makes the connection to my home WiFi. The trigger is not done on the router side. I don’t know whether iOS devices offer the same capability through IFTTT.

With IFTTT I can later add a recipe into the mix for Geofencing. And it can be set up for entry into the geofence, without necessarily setting it up for exit. Such a setup offers an early trigger upon returning home and yet maintain a prompt response when leaving home.

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This is an interesting smartapp but I don’t believe solves my issue. My wife’s mobile phone is extremely unreliable for presence ST mobile app. I went out and bought a fob for her which has also been unreliable since it sits in her car and battery life and outside weather sometimes make it come and go. I now have a third option which is router presence using DD-WRT which should work well when she’s connected to main router, but I also have an extender in the rear of the house. I basically need a best 2 of 3 smartapp. I can probably do this with Rule Machine which I plan on doing having a Master Presence virtual switch and then using Mode director with that. It’s messy but should work.

This app can’t solve false reports, it solves the dead or sticky sensor problem and sometimes the response time problem depending on your mix of presence devices.

I’ve thought of the best of, but it requires three or more sensors per person. Can’t do that with everyone.

That’s ok…I just created a Master Virtual Presence device for my wife and a rule machine rule that does the following below. If ANY of these are true, it sets it Present or Away which essentially makes at least 2 out of the 3 sensors have to work right:

(Fob and ST Mobile) OR (Fob and Wifi Detection) OR (ST Mobile and Wifi Detection)

If 1 out of those 3 is true, it sets the correct state. I think this will work since Fob and ST mobile are so unreliable and now I am increasing my odds of one of them being right at a given time.

Thoughts???

Sounds like it should work to me. Let us know.

Pretty sad that it has come to this that I’ve had to buy a fob for $35 and hack my router just to get mobile presence working for my wife’s phone. What is odd is it works 95% of the time with my phone. The only thing I haven’t done yet is completely wipe my wife’s phone out and have her rebuild it as she wont let me do that (I dont blame her). She has even replaced her physical phone a few times over the years.

@bridaus As reported in my new thread, my idea didn’t work out so well. Last night, my wife’s key fob was reported home, but her ST mobile app acted up and of course the Wifi Detection doesn’t stay sticky because I don’t have good wireless signal towards the rear of the house, so ST had her coming and going as my Rule Machine rule requires 2 sensors to be accurate and only 1 of the 3 was. I am going to try your app out and see if it works out better for me. I am still a little confused the way it works.

To summarize:

  • Her ST mobile app and both her presence fob have been unreliable where sometimes it has her away or home when she’s not actually away or home
  • The Wifi detection is reliable in only certain parts of the house due to poor wireless signal (I have a repeater in the rear of the house, so she drops off my WW-DRT router onto another access point that doesn’t support WW-DRT).

I have had the 3 running for the last 5 days and haven’t noticed when all 3 fail at the same time, it’s either 1 or 2 that fail. Will your smartapp help me in this situation?

On the phone, so sorry if I answer this twice. With the bouncing status, try to find a setting or app that ignores temporary changes. Maybe I should incorporate that into my app. Hmm.

Also, ST has a setting that won’t change presence for a period of time. I think the away setting. Can’t remember where it is…

The away timeout setting can be found in the IDE, under my Hub, utilities, presence time out. Right now I have it set to default 5 minutes.

I am not quite sure I understand your response for above though. So far your app has worked well for me on day 1, but needs to be tested more extensively. It sounds like in your smartapp here, if one of the 3 sensors is home, it will consider wife home,and if one of the sensors is away, it considered her away? I am not sure what you mean that you look at other events from the other sensors?

Sorry it took so long for me to reply, been crazy at work.

It works with events. So it only changes presence when an event happens on any of the sensors. It trusts that an active report by a sensor is true. It fixes the problems with “sticky” or non-reporting sensors, or ones that get left home (the most common problem I have had.)

Examples help.

Let’s say I have a kid with a fob in her backpack and a phone. She leaves for school in the morning with her fob and not her phone. It reports her away (correct, even with the phone home). Then she comes home, it reports her home. (Correct). Then she leaves at night to go shopping with her phone. Reports her away (correct). She arrives. Correct.

Another example: Girlfriend has the phone, and a fob. She always has both. The fob dies one day, or the phone gets sticky (both have happened). No matter what the other presence fixes the problem. If the phone is sticky, the fob sets her home or away.

Measurement is a specialty of mine. And one thing I have absolutely learned is that bad data is much worse than no data. This app depends on good data or no data. I don’t think there is a way to make an app that would handle bad data due to the fact that you can’t instrument your loved ones enough. The second or third fob is a little much… :smiley:

I understand it now. Since my wife’s phone disconnects from our main router, I had to remove that device from the app and will let your app use her keyfob and mobile presence. I then created a Rule Machine rule that said if both are away and she connects to the wifi, then flip the master virtual to present. This will serve as a backup in case both of her other sensors fail when she arrives home. Let’s see how this works out.

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If I ever get the time, these are the features I’d like to add to the app.

Per input sensor settings for:

Trust only for arrive (Default: Off)
Delay before leaving (Default: 300 sec)

Trust only for leaving (Default: Off)
Delay before arriving (Default: 10 sec)

This would handle your need for the rule for wifi. Cause you know if it arrives, it’s there, but if it leaves, you don’t trust that. You would turn “Trust for Arrive only” ON for your wifi connector. It would also handle those fobs a bit too. In the end though, you still have to have at least decent data. If two devices lie a lot of the time, there is no way to handle that.

I feel these settings would also handle a lot of other cases. When I get some time, I will take a swing at it.

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This morning, her presence fob decide that it left the house for 20 minutes and came back and since it was considered an event, her simulated master presence went along with it. It did again for 4 minutes as well. I can’t believe with 3 presence sensors now I still cannot get reliable presence for her!

The four minutes could be handled. The twenty minutes is a stretch. Some questions:

  1. Is your wifi near your hub? I recommend at least ten feet of separation.
  2. Is the fob inside something fortress like?
  3. Is the fob far away from the hub or the nearest ZigBee repeater?
  4. Does she sleep walk? :slight_smile:

When I say mine are near perfect, I’m serious. I think I had one false trigger. I even have one in my truck in the driveway maybe fifty feet through metal and walls. It has to be something in your setup or interference. Really hope we can find something to help you.

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I modified my backup Rule Machine rule so if either her fob or ST mobile app leaves and she’s connected to wifi to flip the master presence back to present which just helped while her fob “left” again this past hour. This should help me somewhat.

My hub is all the way in the back of the house by one of wireless access points, but I had similar problems even when the hub was in front of the house. I moved the hub away from my main wireless router since it was causing interference with my Ringdoor bell. I might move it back and retest.

The key fob which is in her car in the driveway. Usually when this happens it’s the battery but it still says 50 percent left.

Hub likes to be away from any other wireless device. I’ve tested mine and when it gets within about five feet of my router, things go bad. It’s about 8 ft ATM temporarily and I don’t like that.

I thought I’d throw in hire I’ve gotten mine to work, almost perfectly.

Before I set them up this way, I had all kinds of problems. The final straw was when we were all in the car a hundred miles from home and they just kept bouncing back and forth.

I use only our cell phones as our presence sensors

Step one - deleted all phone devices from the ST app.

Step two - created an account at life360. Sent invite from that account to all family members.

Step three - each family member created their own account and became a part of my circle.

Step four - in the marketplace, installed the life360 integrated app.

Step five - setup a rule in rule machine for each device. This is mine:

I have four devices on the AT&T network and one on Sprint. The Sprint phone will sometimes not report right to the life360 app, usually the wrong location. Sprint really sucks in my area. The AT&T phones have not had a single location problem or a false alarm since I implemented this.

I’ve actually gotten to trust it enough that I have the garage door open for a couple of rules triggered by presence.

I’m not saying this is perfect, but I wanted to let every one know my experience.

Well I feel stupid asking this, but I can’t find the life360 app in the market place.

Under Social. If you are in the UK it’s not there, instead there is a whole thread on how to implement it in UK.

Thanks. I sure thought I looked in all the areas, but sure enough its there. :blush:

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