Life360 and Owntracks seem to be the most common used device tracking apps.
For past couple years I’ve only setup zones in HA, nothing on the app itself and response has been good. I am guessing Life360 send coordinates to HA, HA looks at coordinates and see if that places me inside a zone that I have created and marks my person as such.
But recently, it seems updates from my 3rd party app to HA have been slow. So while I am actually in the HOME zone, the app hasnt yet told HA my new coordinates so HA does not consider me HOME.
But now lets say I go into Life360 and create a zone around my house and call that zone, HOME2.
When LIFE360 see’s me enter HOME2 will it be more quicker to send a coordinate update to HA, as opposed to if I had no HOME2 zone setup in Life360?
Exactly correct (except that HA polls Life360 as opposed to Life360 “pushing” the data to HA.)
Life360 Places (which is what Life360 calls “zones”) have no direct effect on the corresponding HA device tracker entities, other than potentially showing up in the place attribute. Whether or not HA shows the entity as being in HA’s home zone (or any other zone, for that matter) only depends on the GPS coordinates (and accuracy) that Life360 provides to HA.
As far as the potential for an indirect effect, AFAIK, a device entering a Life360 Place has no effect on the timeliness of the device’s updated location information making it to the Life360 server and then to HA. But that’s just a guess.
That is (or, at least, should be) strictly a function of Life360’s software (i.e., device app and cloud infrastructure), your device’s settings, its access to GPS, cell service and/or the Internet, etc. You should probably check out their FAQs.
FWIW, weve been using Life360 for many, many years. Two of us have Android devices and live near a large city, and the other two of us use iPhones and live in more of a rural area. The former devices update very frequently (usually, say, every few minutes, if not seconds, depending on movement), whereas the latter often update infrequently (many minutes, or even hours, between updates is not terribly uncommon, especially if there’s no movement.)
Can I change polling time? (Also I am in process of implementing your composite integration, as when I compare timestamps of when I was marked in a certain zone between Life360 and the Mobile App, mobile app sometimes has me in that zone up to a few minutes sooner. Which makes huge difference when my home zone is relatively confined.)
No, at least not without modifying the code. It’s fixed at 10 seconds. When I originally submitted it as a standard integration, I was not allowed to implement a configurable update interval.
For 3 of the 4 devices we use with Life360, I also use the composite to combine those with Google Maps trackers for the same devices. It’s the reason I created the composite integration in the first place.
Yes, but I would think if you’re using the Mobile App (aka Companion App???), then that should work, too. Or you could use all three!
Note, though, that the Life360 and Google Maps integrations provide last_seen attributes, which can make the composite work better. For device tracker entities from integrations that don’t provide the last_seen attribute, the composite has to use the next best thing, which is the state’s last_updated field, which can sometimes be misleading. (I.e., it’s possible for a tracker entity to be updated for other reasons than new GPS location data, e.g., battery status, etc.)
It’s always helpful if you can share YAML snippets as properly formatted text as opposed to a screenshot.
That should work fine. But I’d recommend two minor changes.
First, the name option will be used as the friendly_name attribute, so “Composite Jim” is probably more appropriate than “Composite_Jim”. Either way, the entity ID will be device_tracker.composite_jim.
Second, you might want the composite to use the entity_picture attribute from one of its inputs. E.g., you could change:
Yeah I will. My wife literally just sent me a picture of the lights in the garage not on even though she was home.
I also had just setup a “place” on life360 around our house to alert me when she entered it. So I got alert from Life360 that she had arrived home, but when I checked her person entity in HA, it said she was still in the “almost home” zone, and it was last updated 4 minutes ago.
And shes traveling in her car, so shes covering a lot of ground so no reason Life360 shouldent be triggering a change.
I’m gonna set her up tonight same as me, Life360, companion app, and google maps!
FWIW, I’ve pretty much always had a fairly large home zone in HA (i.e., a radius of 304 meters.) Rarely have I had an issue of a device not being seen in that zone when it physically gets to the house, although it has happened a few times over the past several years. But, then again, that’s mostly with our two Android devices. As I mentioned above, the iPhones aren’t generally in the area, so I’m not sure how well they would do if they were around more.
Besides using multiple GPS-based trackers, for the “to home” transition it can often help to use some sort of ping or router-based entity (device_tracker or binary_sensor.) They tend to switch to home quickly when detected, but not so well in the reverse (which is why the composite, by default, only uses the “to home” transition of these types of entities.)
Unfortunately, the API that the HA Life360 integration is using is undocumented and unsupported (to the best of my knowledge.) It’s based on some reverse engineering someone had done many years ago. If there’s a way to get more timely updates, I’m not aware of it.
Hi @KarinaS. It’s best not to ask a completely unrelated question in an existing topic. You should open a new topic to request help. Go to the Configuration or Installation page and click the “+ New Topic” button.
With home assistant app you can also use the high accuracy mode to get updates more frequently.
I have this mode on when I’m driving so that it responds to home/away