How do I configure OwnTracks with max_gps_accuracy these days?

Configuration
1

I’ve seen references to putting max_gps_accuracy into the configuration.yaml file, but it seems like this may be one of those things that has moved out of the configuration.yaml file? I’m pretty new to Home Assistant, and it is very confusing reading old articles on how to achieve something that don’t match up with the current Home Assistant UI and configuration files.

Can you please be very specific on what I need to put where in the most recent version? I tried just adding a device_tracker section to my configuration.yaml and it seemed to override the existing OwnTracks stuff and broke everything.

On a semi-related note - how do I remove old and unused OwnTracks Entities? When I try to “Remove Selected” it says “You can only remove 0 of the selected 1 entities. Entities can only be removed when the integration is no longer providing the entities. Sometimes you have to restart Home Assistant before you can remove the entities of a removed integration. Are you sure you want to remove the removable entities?”

2

If anybody comes across this same issue, I have resolved it. I’m not sure what I did differently the first time, but you can in fact add the owntracks section to the configuration.yaml and only add the max_gps_accuracy. As of June 2022, there is no settings UI that lets you configure this directly in the UI, and it is still done in the configuration.yaml.

Specifically:

  1. Open your configuration.yaml through a method of your choosing (file editor, samba, VS Code add-on, etc.)
  2. Add a section anywhere for owntracks
  3. Under owntracks, add a max_gps_accuracy of 200, or whatever value you wish. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe this value is the number +/- meters from the actual location.
  4. Restart Home Assistant (you might be able to restart part of it, I restarted the whole thing just to be safe)

For example:

owntracks:
  max_gps_accuracy: 200