I’ve just joined the SmartThings world in the last week! I’m working on getting presence based actions the way I like them, or rather, sorting out the wrinkles. Leaving seems to work pretty well, but returning is inconsistent in how long it takes to happen. It works, it’s just that it takes 20 minutes to realize I’m back sometimes. It seems like presence is defined by some combination of position reported by IP, GPS and other variables. Is it possible to make return actions triggered by wifi connections? This would be far more reliable for me than it appears to be now.
I second and third the fact that Life360 works much better. And you can incorporate it directly in SmartThings. Check out SmartThings Labs and look for the Life360 app.
Setup a home account and invite all the people that you need to have presence sensors through that account on Life360.
If you have additional questions please post them here in the community. We are always glad to help
I really dislike how Life360 tries to upsell you like crazy all the time.
What kind of device is it? I have had pretty good luck with the out of the box presence sensor in Android. Are you on iPhone? It might be worth it to just slap down the $40 or whatever for the presence sensor and leave it in your car or backpack.
Thanks for this thread. I just switched over to Life360 and hoping it is as advertised. I like being able to see where everyone is, even if they aren’t at a location SmartThings is aware of. Also, with SmartThings I had to make the Geofence quite large to not trigger false positives. So large in fact that I a large highway was included and I couldn’t “not include” it, while still preventing false positives. This highway is also one I regularly travel on without actually going home, so, obviously, not ideal.
Honestly, if SmartThings wanted to just improve their app to incorporate everything Life360 has, I’d love to go back to SmartThings, but at the same time, I’d rather them devote their manhours elsewhere if this works.
@theedpope So, Life360 doesn’t seem to be as accurate as I had hoped. The actual Life360 app seems fine but it doesn’t appear to actually interact with SmartThings in a reliable way. I have to go into the “Thing”, into Life360 settings for it, and just hit Done again, for it to update SmartThings properly on my wife’s phone.
Quite annoying and generally useless. The default presence sensor was definitely better in this regard.
@bmmiller, I had the same problem with my house being close to the main road I always use. I moved the center of the geo-fence away from the house, so that the circle would include the house but not the road. Geo-presence generally works really well for me.
@theedpope I know how the app is supposed to work. It just isn’t updating SmartThings consistently, unfortunately. Randomly it just fails to update at all. For what it’s worth, it seems to update just fine for my phone, but not my wife’s phone. The main Life360 account is my account and her account is just “associated” with my account as a person of interest or whatever. I’m not sure if that has something to do with it.
@625alex Yeah, I tried that, but unfortunately, the SmartThigns presence seems to like to find us at an intersection (even while at home) that is about a half mile from the house. There is just no way to include that intersection without picking up some of the highway. The result is having to decide what kind of false positives I want. Falsely tell ST that we’re away when we’re at home still, or falsely tell ST we’re home when we’re just driving semi-close to home.
For now, Life360 seems to be much more accurate and I’m just hoping it begins to actually update ST like it should. A backup I’m looking into is utilizing Tasker to POST to ST when we’re home based on Wifi network. My wife and I always have our phones on us and are always on Wifi so that is just as good as GPS for us. We also both have Android phones and I’m already well versed in Tasker.