ST Arrival Sensors: Random misfires

Devices & Integrations
1

We have ST Arrival Sensors in our boys’ backpacks so we know when they arrive home from school.

The problem: On occasion, when the backpacks are just sitting at home, they’ll mysteriously ‘depart’, and then ‘arrive’ again almost immediately. (The backpacks will not have moved.)

That’s obviously an annoyance. Even worse, though, is that the arrival will trigger SHM to disarm if we’re not home.

  • Their usual storage place (our back door) is in close proximity to the hub – there are no architectural barriers
  • They work almost flawlessly for sensing real arrivals – with an impressive range (the sidewalk in front of our house)
  • So . . . I can’t for the life of me figure out why they mysteriously depart and then return on their own. (It’s not an issue of range or signal.)

If it’s not range to the hub or architectural interference, what might be causing this?

Whenever they erroneously “depart”, they show up as returning almost immediately. There’s never a timelag between departure and arrival when these misfires happen. Is there any way to set up rules so that an Arrival Sensor can’t “arrive” unless it’s been gone for a minimum amount of time? (e.g. set it so that the arrival sensor cannot detect an arrival unless ST knows that it’s been gone for at least 10 minutes – which would fix my problem!?)

2

Have similar issues with my presence sensors. @Aaron said he’ll look into it, not sure if he is tracking these incidents. Anyhow, I pasted below the official response received from support. I didn’t have any other misfires since then, but it has been only about a week since the ticket was closed

Support response:
"There was an issue with some SmartApps that were running both locally and in the cloud. She fixed this. This issue may have affected the reporting of the local arrival sensor device. The engineer could not see any other issues on the account, but please let me know if you experience the issue again. "

3

Thanks. When was that Support response?

(My most recent two misfires were Saturday afternoon - 2 days ago - with one of the sensors, and then yesterday afternoon with a different sensor.)

4

You may have some of the same issues I had, where apps were triggered both locally and cloud as support mentioned. I would reach out to them and let them investigate what’s going on…

5

I’ve had this same issue several times with my two presence sensors. I opened a ticket a while back. They suggested checking the batteries. I also went into the app and reset my geofence. It got to be too much. I’ve moved over to mobile presence and have had no issues since.

If you search the forums there are some lengthy threads on it and I’d also open a support ticket and let them know if the issue.

6

That used to be the case, but more recent posts were encouraging. However, the jury is still out on the recent reliability:

7

@SBDOBRESCU Thanks for the link! Read through. Interesting little device in there. I’m still going to stick with mobile presence. Seems to work well for me. :slight_smile:

8

I had had the same experience when I bought a sensor a few months back from Best Buy. I made two changes this time around and so far so good

  1. I put in some zigbee repeaters around the house.
  2. Bought the arrival sensor from ST website instead of BB; thought they have to have the latest ones; BB may have had old stock
9

departure-delay-minutes-parameter is built-in to smartapps such as “Someone Arrives”. The parameter is prompted “Minimum away time (minutes)”

I occasionally got momentary departures and stretched from 1-2-3 up to 7 minutes where they got filtered out. Too long but it works ok for a year.

10

I use Life360 to try and avoid ST issues and yet I still have them. My wife’s phone has tripped the alarm twice in the last few weeks when it didn’t detect her coming home one time until 8 mins later. We also them the presence leave and come back when we are watching TV

Rick