I have a presence tag device (because it came with the kit) and the small size is nice; it easily hangs onto a keychain. However design is a tradeoff of features. Interrelated parameters with the tag device include battery size, battery life, how frequent it wakes up to contact the hub. The shipping device represents once choice of the combinations. It is small, so to get a decent battery life the time between wakeups to check if it can contact the hub must be set to a relatively large number of seconds. I don’t know about other people, but I find that when I arrive home the tag usually fails to notify the hub it is present before I open a door.
I think there is a market for a larger-sized tag that is rechargable so that it could consume more battery power per period of time. In turn that would allow it to have a stronger signal, letting it be detected at a longer distance or more reliably at a short distance. And the wakeup period could be short. An example application would be in a car. A tag that woke up every few seconds would actually work the way the demo on the Smartthings site show, quickly telling the hub the car is home in time for all the wonderful events to happen.
Hi Mike - You’ve got a great understanding of how the tag works and the tradeoffs we’ve made. Thanks for the suggestion. We are looking at ways to redesign the SmartSense Presence as well as our other devices from a form factor perspective but also at the firmware level. Another feature we want to add (no timetable yet) is configurable check-in intervals, motion sense intervals, etc so that, depending upon each person’s use case they could determine their own tradeoffs: battery-life, more precision, etc. I know that doesn’t help you now. There are other paths as well. I could see devices like the Automatic acting as a tag for your car, and then of course there is always the sometimes-maligned mobile presence (aka using your phone to detect presence) - have you tried that? I have had really good results but I know others are not having the best of luck.
Ideally I;d like something that used inductive charging. You could seal it up nice and tight for water proofing, and all you’d need to do to charge it is lay it on a mat. A lot of new cars use this type of charging. When you slip the fob into the ignition it charges it.