Best practice for presence-based arm/disarm with SPC Bridge?

[Scarface0881]

Hi all,

I’m using Home Assistant together with the Lundix SPC Bridge to arm and disarm my Vanderbilt SPC4300 automatically based on whether anyone is home, and I’d like to hear how others have approached this.

The basic idea: I have a Home zone with a ~50m radius. As long as at least one phone is detected inside that zone, the alarm should stay disarmed. As soon as the last phone leaves the zone, the alarm should arm automatically. And as soon as the first phone re-enters the zone, it should disarm again immediately.

Here’s roughly what I’ve tried so far to implement that:

1. Started with HA’s built-in person entities for presence.
2. Moved to WiFi-based device trackers (phone connects/disconnects from the home network) for more reliable detection.
3. Added iCloud3 (fuses Apple’s Find My with the HA mobile app’s GPS) as a second confirmation, to avoid false arming during brief WiFi/AP dropouts. This turned out unreliable in practice (stale data, slow polling, occasional multi-hour lag), so I removed it again.
4. Currently: arming requires WiFi trackers for all household members to report “away” continuously for 5 minutes (filters out short WiFi blips). Disarming triggers on WiFi OR Bluetooth (ESPHome Bluetooth proxies + the “Private BLE Device” integration for one family member so far, since Bluetooth detects arrival within seconds). I chose not to require Bluetooth for arming too, since Private BLE Device has a known ~15-20 minute delay for detecting “away” with no configurable timeout.

I already asked the SPC Bridge developer directly, but this isn’t a use case he has personal experience with, so he pointed me here.

Question: is this roughly the approach people converge on for presence-based arming, or is there a more elegant/stable way to solve this that I might be missing? Any pitfalls to watch out for, or recommendations (hardware, integrations, or logic) that have worked well for you?

Thanks!

[aceindy]

I am actually using the lundix spc bridge (but not with auto-arming; it is used at the office and not really working for 100+ people )
(however, i use it the other way around; i turn off equipment when alarm is armed

Anyway, with my home alarm (different system) I used to arm it by means of Proximity…that worked great I had my trigger at 200 mtrs.

You can also use them with a group

[Scarface0881]

Thanks for sharing that, appreciate it! Proximity does look like an elegant approach, but I think I’d just run into an old, familiar problem again: it relies on continuous GPS coordinates from the phone, and GPS-based tracking is exactly what gave us trouble before (we used to run iCloud3, which fuses Apple’s Find My with the HA app’s GPS, and it turned out unreliable in practice - stale data, slow polling).

Out of curiosity, though - what kind of device/tracker were you using with Proximity, and was it Android or iOS? I’m wondering if the reliability difference comes down to that, since iOS is known to throttle background GPS pretty aggressively for battery reasons.

[aceindy]

IOS.

Works pretty ok here (Netherlands)
Have to male sure HA app is on always allow (and check regularly)

Looks like it is updated at least every 5 minutes.

But it will also force updates when entering/leaving a geologic location (home, work, school etc)

And for zones you can set the radius