I am new to the SmartThings community as well as home automation in general, however I am already having a great and addicting experience!
The first project I had worked on was setting up garage door automation and specifically as it relates to me coming and going. All has been going good, except perhaps for the sometimes presence delay.
Sometimes I see my garage door opening as I am driving down the street (I want this) and sometimes I have to park and wait in front of the door for it to open (I don’t want this). This makes me think that presence may be updated on a fixed schedule, such as ever X seconds. Is this true? If so, could I change this so that it will update more frequently?
By the way, I am using an Android based smartphone (Galaxy S5) as my presence sensor.
Welcome to Smartthings second biggest weakness (reliability being their first), Mobile Presence. Whether it’s IOS, Android or the physical fobs, you will find complaints across this community with mobile presence not working at all or having some delays such as yours(consider yourself lucky that it at least works). I even tried to resort to using Life360 and that had issues with ST as well. We are hoping their v2 hub with Bluetooth handles Presence better, but I am not hopeful since Bluetooth has limited range and won’t help from all the way in your driveway for some.
Presence is such a big deal – its pretty crazy how much of a choke point it is. Unfortunately, it has to be right every time.
I am doing a combination of monitoring ARP tables (which I can’t do from ST unfortunately), to Tasker + BT Near + HTTP Endpoints. I even have some light facial recognition on some of my cameras. You pretty much have to throw the kitchen sink at reliably detecting if people are where they are supposed to be.
