Automation - ping as service in action section?

Configuration
1

Hi

Is it possible to force a extra ping for devices in device_tracker via the action section in automation ?

Case :
All the phones in the family are already tracked via ping in device_tracker every few minutes. But when the outside camera picks up a person around the house I would like to force a extra ping for every phone straight away - and if no phones responds then throw an alarm message to house owner.

Thank you for any help.

2

Starting with 0.81 there is a new homeassistant.update_entity service available. It takes one parameter – entity_id – which, like most services that accept this parameter, can be a single entity_id, a list of entity_id’s, or a string containing multiple entity_id’s separated by commas.

But, unfortunately, device_trackers don’t work like other entities. I.e., they don’t have an update method that can be forced to execute via this new service. So as far as I know, no, there isn’t a way to force a ping device_tracker to update on command. The best I believe you can do is to shorten the ping interval via the interval_seconds config parameter.

3

Any news for this? Can you force it now?

4

Well, several of the device tracker platforms have been converted to the new “entity based” device tracker architecture, so I guess for those the homeassistant.update_entity might would work??? I don’t really know. But, even so, I think the ping device tracker platform is still a “legacy” tracker, so it still wouldn’t work for it.

5

I don’t know since when, but I can confirm that homeassistant.update_entity works for force-updating the ping tracker now!