I’ve been trying for some time to get an automation to work. This being, once I arrive home, this will trigger a light on my drive to turn on. Rather than using my home zone, I created a ‘drive’ zone.
I had issues with HA tracker so I’m now using life360, which appears to be doing the job. Just nothing I do seems to work. I tried using the drive zone in passive mode, reduced my Home radius so that the two zones don’t overlap, if that makes a difference.
Just sat in the lounge with my phone on the side and the automation was triggered. No idea how, as it’s not near the zone, unless the gps drifted but that’s as close as I’ve had it to being triggered.
Just noticed another issue which may be the cause but not sure. As mentioned, I had issue with the tracker, I set up life360 and it all seemed fine. But no matter what I do, I’m always being shown as home. It doesn’t change. I assigned the life360 tracker to my user (admin). Maybe that’s the issue? So I removed it and created a new person but did not assign a user and still the same, showing as at home.
Any ideas please?
EDIT:
I checked the tracking in the ios app and it bounces around, so that explains why it triggered the automation but no idea why I can not trigger this myself. I’ve included the super simple automation.
I just left the house, turned my phone off and still, according to HA on my laptop, it never left.
The problem is likely to be that you need to be reported in that zone and if the zone is narrow enough, that’s not going to happen except by pure luck.
Instead I’d highly recommend proximity. Then you can use that - for example less than 500 meters away and heading towards home.
Thank you. I will look into that as I’ve not heard of it before. Looks like I may have to go down the yaml route, rather than using the automation section to chose a setup.
I managed to get the automation to work in the end and it seems to recognise when I leave the house, so I’ve removed the other zone and just using zone.home as that works as a trigger now. I created a new user, and assigned the tracker to that. Although it works, it takes 4 minutes before the automation is activated, rendering the act pointless.
Now, is that down to my Pi being slow, due to the sd card or HA itself? As when I pulled up on the drive, I opened HA straight away and it connected.
It’s down to the nature of GPS trackers only updating every so often. Using those for precise timing is going to be full of pain. I use Bluetooth (and WiFi) for home/away, and proximity (and travel time) for timing.
You can make this work, but you have to assume that things may update at times that aren’t convenient, and build your logic around that.
