For anyone else that stumbles on this thread with a similar issue, I eventually set the accuracy settings to about 5000, but it didn’t help the results. I rarely saw anything high come across with my Node-Red logging set up to monitor it, but was still seeing large gaps of 15-30 minutes (last night my wife drove home from her dads place about 45 minutes away with an update in his town and the next just down the road from our house).
My solution came from my sister who set up a Life360 thing with my parents (they are OTR truckers) so we could keep track of them and make sure they were ok during longer stretches of no contact. I had messed with it once years ago and it didn’t work well so I abandoned it, but installed it to keep up with them at least, I was amazed as how quickly it would update, could literally watch them drive down the road, so I’ve set up the Life360 integration and set it up on my wife’s phone and am in business again. It’s at least as good as Zanzito, maybe better and doesn’t appear to have made any significant impact on battery drain.
Just a heads up we had a bug report come in on discord this past week about missed location events. It’s now fixed in the latest beta. The user was able to provide the logs from their device so we were able to determine what happened.
Of course, sorry for the delay, just saw this. Here’s the basic flow, it triggers when there is a state change on my Pixel’s device tracker (“events : state” node). In my testing I had the two debug output modules which show the bits you want to grab. Then I used a function node to format and output my the data into a file node to save the data. Here’s the code from the function node.
var varmessage = "Timestamp: " + msg.data.new_state.last_changed + ". Accuracy: " + msg.data.new_state.attributes.gps_accuracy + "."
var returnMsg={"payload": varmessage};
return (returnMsg);
Great thanks a lot, I will be testing that out.
Do you use this output for the maps you posted earlier in this thread?
Because if I look at the map card built into home assistant it only shows my current location.
Ah, that’s the map card in Lovelace. Just add it to your Lovelace and in the config you can set the “Hours to Show” and it adds a back track for how ever many hours you put in there. I’m not sure how far back you can have it go. I actually have a tab set as a panel with just the map card in it which gives me a full screen map with the history which is neat. I barely ever use the map page anymore.
Is there a special setting I need to activate, because it doesn’t show my route at all. For example I just drove from home (where my wife is (mf)) to a new location (me) and it doesn’t show the route.
Hmm, I don’t think so. Maybe the history/logging components need to be enabled if you don’t have them turned on. I can looks later when I’m at a computer, the documentation for the map card didn’t mention any requirements that I saw.
Could try restarting Home Assistant too, shouldn’t need to, but it can’t hurt.
Edit:
These are the configuration.yaml entries below. I don’t know that any or all of them are needed, but it wouldn’t hurt to check and try that.
Thx quizzical for info and link. I can confirm, after as I installed this beta version apps everything return to normal, proper state.
I had on my road to work many test purpose zones side by side. Each one of them was 100 meter diameter. My average speed was circa 50 km/h. Thus, Companion App had only couple of second to notice zone changes and my previous version app can’t recognized this zones offen than every 35-50 seconds. Don’t matter which setting I changed inside mobile app. Now, after installed beta Companion App can without problems recognized this zones every 10 seconds (I have this value now in settings).
I’m glad it wasn’t just me, I really wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. I look forward to the update, redundancy is always good.
