Is Zanzito abandoned?

Archive Zanzito for Android
1

I’ve recently bought Zanzito app and I’m very happy with it. But looking at forums looks like all activity with this app stopped some months ago. Official forums in Zanzito’s web site are almost empty and full of spam, last post from Zanzito author here in HA’s forum is from half a year ago (and is something like “sorry I haven’t had time for Zanzito lately”), and of course there haven’t been new versions in a while.

I’m worried Zanzito isn’t developed anymore, not because the money I paid, but because it’s a closed app and any MQTT API change or such might make it unusable with nobody maintaining it.

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I have asked that he open source it. I gladly paid for the family license, and would love to help get the app updated with a better GUI and some more options. I have heard nothing back. He’s not responding to Google Play or the forums. Maybe we need to get a new project organized to provide the same functions, but be open source.

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First I’ll say I wouldn’t worry about MQTT changing the way it functions anytime soon. That seems unlikely, and even if it did, I’d expect it to be a major version change or something and it’d likely have some kind of legacy support.

I am sad that the project has fallen to the side to the point of nothing at all for so long. It had a lot of potential and it’s a really good app. I like what it can do already and would have liked to have seen Tasker integration or similar functionality come out of it along with support for iBeacons, the GPS tracking is already some of the best, better than OwnTracks was for me (I use the OT emulation feature now) and I think iBeacons would have made it nearly perfect.

I’m not a dev, but I would do whatever I could to support a fresh project that tackled replacing Zanzito while being open source and such.

4

I wish this thread had been started yesterday, I just went and bought a family lic. for Zanzito.
Of course I was using Owntracks on Android so there is that

5

I do still think it’s one of the best presence options out there, so if you bought it as a replacement to OwnTracks, I think it’s still worth it. And some of the other functionality works just fine (like the voice thing where I can send an MQTT message to a specific topic and the phone will speak it).

6

I just played with that.
I noticed that HA isn’t updating positioning (using owntrack emulation) and other sensors from Zanzito but I can send MQTT messages to my phone and make it talk :slightly_smiling_face:

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Should work, you sure you have the HA config right? Give me a few and I’ll copy paste mine in here.

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I had Owntracks setup and working. I was getting battery level and location which was mapped correctly.
I thought I had successfully tested Zanzito in Demo mode. I bought Zanzito, uninstalled Owntracks and nothing.

Oh wait, I changed Zanzito to use port 8883 instead of 1883. The Hass.io connection hasn’t changed (port 1883) and I did not turn off port 1883 in the broker, just closed the port routing from outside.

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I use the ‘Alarm’ feature to send urgent notifications to my phone if something sets off my camera motion sensors/intrusion detection, or a door/window is opened if I have my House Alarm enabled. REALLY handy to have. If the alert clears it speaks the cleared message to me.

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For the known_devices, do this:

michael_michael:
  hide_if_away: false
  icon:
  mac: 98:F1:70:94:7E:75
  name: Michael
  picture: /local/michael.png
  track: true
  vendor:

Then on the phone, set the Device name to “Michael” in my case. Set up the MQTT settings. Under location I check “Track Location”, “High precision”, “Minimum distance at 20”, and “Share my location”. Then under Owntracks emulation, enabled, Device ID “Michael” and set tracker id.

I believe if you want it to show like owntracks does, the “Device Name” in the main settings should be owntracks. (basically, the MQTT topic is “/Device name/Device ID” if I’m not mistaken, though it may be reversed. So then your config would be like:

owntracks_michael:
  hide_if_away: false
  icon:
  mac: 98:F1:70:94:7E:75
  name: Michael
  picture: /local/michael.png
  track: true
  vendor:
11

Thanks,

I found that I had set the Zanzito device to mynamecell which I thought was throwing off my HA setup as it was looking for owntrack/myname/my-cell/, I corrected that and checked the logs and it was sending on the proper topic.
Further testing it still isn’t working, it seems Zanzito is sending but MQTT is not receiving the messages. Zanzito does receive all messages for the topics it’s listening to though.

12

If you go into Zanzito, Admin, and then Discover Current Topics, do you see the location topic?

Also might be worth restarting the mosquitto server, just to verify that isn’t the issue. I had a lot of trial and error with my initial configuration of Zanzito and other MQTT things and sometimes it was something dumb like changing a setting and not restarting the server/service.

13

Well I’ve made some dumb oversights, zanzito can publish the the owntracks/myname/my-cell topic.
It seems that the owntracks emulation isn’t though. The log shows it publishing but mqtt isn’t seeing the pub. I have a cli MQTT_sub for the owntrack/# topic and nothing is showing up from zanzito unless I manually publish a test to the owntracks/myname/my-cell topic.

14

Well I will show myself the door.
I left an extra character in my device ID, ‘mynames’ instead of ‘myname’.
so it’s working now.

Now to figure out what else I can do. I see the owntracks emulation doesn’t include Battery %

1 Like
15

create a sensor:

- platform: mqtt
  state_topic: "zanzito/flamingm0e/battery_level"
  name: "My Phone Battery"
  unit_of_measurement: "%"
  value_template: '{{ value_json }}'
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You can find the author in telegram where is also a dedicated channel called Zanzito - Official

1 Like
17

Thank you! I had no idea there was a group for Zanzito!

18

I see you just joined… welcome aboard…

1 Like
19

Just a broadcast group? No chat?

20

Yes, chat… not so busy, but chat