T austin virtual presence switch

Hey, I thought I just throw this open to see if anybody knows before I tear everything apart

but does anyone know/is there any reason why all of a sudden my presence sensors would stop working? Just like the day before yesterday.

Using T Austin’s virtual switch (vedge creator 2.94).

Can’t even turn it on manually within the ST app. Pressing the on off button just makes it go around in circles.

Mine is working. Have you tried rebooting your hub?

I will give that a shot thank you.

Some of my virtual switches wouldn’t turn on/off either over the past couple days but they started working again the next day.

When a switch got stuck again tonight I changed the driver to “Virtual Switch” (by Samsung) in the app and to my surprise it started working. Not sure went on in the background. Give it a try.

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Well, that’s reassuring. I was wondering if it was just me. I was unaware that Samsung even had a virtual switch. I work out of my house so I don’t leave every day but when somebody returns tonight, I will check to see if the switch is working again. If not, I’ll try that one that you mentioned - thank you!

Yup, I have been having trouble too. And rebooting the hub didn’t solve it. In fact it is a problem on both my hubs in 2 different locations. I also abandoned Todd’s virtual driver and replaced it with the native one from SmartThings.

See the last couple of days at the end of this thread:

You can try the Group TrackR Presence sensor from @Mariano_Colmenarejo they made it for me for a project I’m working on and hope to release soon to the SmartThings community.

Mariano Shared Beta Driver channel.

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Thanks for the heads up, I didn’t know Mariano had a presence sensor. What is the location status for?

It is for a companion app that I am in the process of finishing up. It is essentially a Life360-type app. I’ve been designing it to allow smart home integration.

The location status will show whatever current geofence the user is in, or it will also show the status of whether they are walking, driving, etc.

This will allow you to set up automations based on a person’s location. Since we’re only allowed three linked places to a location this will expand our ability to do more location-based automations.

There is also a companion web app that can run inside a dashboard that supports external HTML like sharptools.

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I’m using this with Miss A to announce someone’s arrival. So essentially it’s a virtual presence that kicks over to a virtual switch. Can you use this in the same way?

Alan, I’m sorry to be obtuse here but where is the native Smart things driver for this? Problem with me is I do all of these automations and whatnot myself. I essentially learn what I need to know, set them up, and I don’t really look at them again ever. Unless they start acting up. And of course, by that time I forgotten everything about it. So can you jog my memory here? Really sorry

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a sensor (shows up as a switch) for Alexa purposes and therefore can’t be used as a trigger in Alexa routines like virtual sensors in the vEdge Creator driver.

I will see if we can get this worked into that sensor.

Just an update after the latest firmware update it seems to be better and working. Someone arrived home today and I’ve just noticed that the present sensor is on an active. So there’s that maybe that’s all it needed? Anyone else still having problems?

Sorry, I haven’t been here for a couple of days. I’m on an Android phone. They are in the ST app, select the 3 bar Menu at the bottom right, then select the Labs button in the middle section. Scroll down, on my phone it is the 2nd last choice.

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Even though I moved away from the TAustin virtual presence switches because of the issues (I only had 2 so it was simpler), I kept them in the app, just not on my Favourites screen. So I just checked one of them. At least now when I press the on/off button, it is actually responds right away. It changes the presence state display. And when you go into the tile, the value of the switch now matches the value of the presence sensor, i.e. if the switch is On, the presence is Present. Before when it was acting weird, the switch would say Off but it was Present, or vice versa.

But I think I’m just going to stay with the changes I made to using the ST virtual switch. The most compelling reason for me to use the vEdge switches was for display purposes. The ST switch says On which when I glance at it, I have to remember that it means Present. Todd’s switch said Present so there was no interpretation. It even messes up my Sharptools dashboard, because now the tiles in Sharptools say On whereas before they also said Present.

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