Connect ping to person

Configuration
1

Hello everyone,

I am quite sure that I did not yet get the concepts behind home assistant, but maybe this will help me. :wink:

I have users, e.g. me, and I would like to link the status to one or several trackers, e.g. ping. As I also have my TV pinged for an automation, those pings are done as binary_sensor, like in the following:

binary_sensor
  - platform: ping
    name: ping_phone_user
    host: 192.168.178.52

How can I connect the on/off state to the user? I cannot choose this in the resulting entities in the user configuration.

As soon as I replace binary_sensor with device_tracker, I receive errors when checking the config. Does ping not work with device_tracker?
Thanks for your help!

Best regards,
Fo

2

You canā€™t do this, only device_tracker entities can be linked to a user.

Thereā€™s multiple workaround such as creating an MQTT device tracker and update the status with an automation or the custom component composite device tracker that allows to include binary sensos.

1 Like
3

Thank you, it took me a while, but I understood and learned on the go and got it to work. :slight_smile:

And now I have noticed, that router presence is much more reliable than ping. :man_shrugging:

1 Like
4

Oh, and in case someone else wants to try to solve this as well: Donā€™t! :smiley:

Use router presence if possible. Ping drops relatively often and marks people as ā€œnot homeā€. This still happens when a long delay for marking people ā€œnot homeā€ is given. So far, router presence has been much more reliable and quite accurately shows when someone is home or not.

In case you still want to or have to do this:

device_tracker:
  - platform: mqtt
    devices:
      user_phone_mqtt: 'ping/user'