iCloud3 v3 iDevice Tracker - Version 3 Prerelease version is now available

@Allistah
It sounds like a GPS wandering problem where iCloud or the ios app returns a location outside of the zone . iCloud3 will catch it and discard the new location if it is outside the zone and inside twice the zone’s radius. There was probably a gps accuracy error. In this case, the Event Log will show what is going on.

There is not much you can do about it.

Hi Gary, this didn’t seem to happen a lot in the past. What would yield better results with this setting: ignore_gps_accuracy_inzone?

Should I have that set to true or false? I had it set to true and last night it freaked my wife out in the middle of the night as Alexa started talking at 2:30am.

I flipped it to false and had iCloud3 reload itself. I guess we will see what happens.

I tried iphone detect (HACS) which detects if a device is active on my local wifi. It too has a fatal bug with iphones. The iphone occasionally goes into battery saver mode and drops off the local wifi…so you get notified that the phone is not home. No way to turn off that “feature”. I think the only way is to combine integrations. garage door opened and phone dropped from wifi within 5 minutes means away or similar. I’ve given up trying to use icloud3…not due to Gary’s code…but due to GPS drift issues.

@ghstudio

  1. That is a problem with network detection, which I gave up on for the same reason years ago. What happens when you use iC3 and do not use the wifi network detection. I think this might be part of your problem.
  2. In iC3, what is your gps_accuracy_threshold parameter. Try increasing it. I’m using 100.
  3. In HA, what is your home zone radius parameter. I think I’m using 70.

When that happens, export the Event Log and email to [email protected]. I’ll take a look at it.

@Allistah
The problem would be worse if you ignore gps accuracy when in a zone since it would not discard anything and locations outside would always be accepted, causing more wandering. Perhaps you could change the automations/scripts conditions to not run your automations during night time hours.

Thanks Gary, so I had it right the first time. Maybe I wonder if I increased the size of the “Home” zone, so if it moved around it will still be inside the zone? I’ll look at the coordinates and see how far it was away from the house and see what I can figure out.

I use an input-boolean as a secondary check on home/not_home. I just recently felt comfortable enough to remove the time constraints from my garage door automation.

Hey guys, looking forward to trying out this automation. I have a use case where i’d like to track some family members and run automations when they get to my house but not necessarily let them have access to the HA IOS app, can I use this integration to track family members and zones without the HA app installed on their device?

@ideal2545
iCloud3 will work fine without having the iOS installed on some of your phones. The documentation here discusses the iOS App and what happens when you do not install it.

Since the iOS App triggers zone exits, you would want to use a short inzone_time parameter (15-20 min) to trigger zone exits.

Hey Gary,

Setting ignore_gps_accuracy_inzone to FALSE fixed the announcements issue for me. It was set to true prior. It has not announced someone leaving or arriving in the middle of the night since I set it to false.

Hi Gary, I was thrown for for a couple of hours today when trying to set up the Lovelace Event log card from the official instructions (after installing via HACS). Had to do a Google search to find an external suggestion to go to Configuration | Lovelace Dashbords | Resources and add /local/custom_cards/icloud3-event-log-card.js?v=1.001. Now it works. Just mentioning it in case the instructions need tweaking - or maybe, more likely, there was something in there that I missed!

@Michael-M
I’ll check it out. When starting iCloud3, it checks to see if /local/custom_cards/icloud3-event-log-card.js exists. If it doesn’t, it is suppose to create the directory and copy the file to it. It it does exist, the version is checked to see if it needs to be updated.

Did you ever restart HA after installing iCloud3 or were you setting up the Event Log before restarting HA? If so, the docs may need to be tweaked a bit.

I installed iCloud3, added a couple of tracker cards from the docs (which seemed fine), restarted HA several times (for other reasons), then came back a day later and thought it would be useful to add icloud3-event-log-card.

I just have installed an Airtag and it is not visible when I login in iCloud web page.

@Marsman
Air tags can not be tracked. For more info on this, follow the discussion here

that doesn’t make sense (doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just illogical)

@ghstudio
It doesn’t make sense to me either. I’ll change the wording in the next release.

Is it possible to use this to determine whether a device (specifically, a Watch) is locked/unlocked?

Gary,

Any idea what’s going on with the log messages? Only my apple cloud accounts are showing up on the map, not the iOS app device trackers


device_tracker:
  - platform: icloud3
    username: [email protected]
    password: xxxoooxxx
    track_devices:
      - bill_iphone_app > [email protected]
      - ted_iphone_app > [email protected]

Log


Logger: homeassistant.components.device_tracker
Source: components/device_tracker/legacy.py:523 
Integration: Device tracker (documentation, issues) 
First occurred: 11:50:29 AM (268 occurrences) 
Last logged: 11:50:56 AM

The see service is not supported for this entity device_tracker.bill_iphone_app
The see service is not supported for this entity device_tracker.Ted_iphone_app

See the docs here for the see error message solution. You might also want to review the how the phone muse be named on the iPhone, the iCloud account and in the ios app here.

The device_name must be the iCloud account name, no the ios app device_tracker entity name.

Also, the track_devices configuration parameter is depreciated. Use the devices parameter instead. See here and here for more info.

In your case, the parameters would be:

    devices:
      - device_name: bill_iphone
        email: [email protected]
        name: Bill
      - device_name: ted_iphone
        email: [email protected]
        name: Ted