Yes, like most things in HA, datetimes will be in UTC, and unless there is some special frontend feature to display it in a different time zone, it will be displayed in UTC.
You could use my composite tracker, even with just one “input” tracker like Life360. It sill has the time_as feature. The downside is it doesn’t take all the attributes from the input trackers, so you’ll lose direct visibility of those.
Technically speaking, it can be negative infinity. Practically speaking, I guess it depends on your system. Also don’t forget the shorter you make this the more frequently it will be hitting the Life360 server. I personally wouldn’t go any lower than 5 to 10 seconds.
To answer your questions about zones, no, I currently do not provide (nor plan to provide) a way to adjust a zone that is created automatically from a Life360 Place. Yes, you can still create zones in HA (the normal way), even if you have life360 automatically creating zones from Places. No, AFAIK, there is no problem with having overlapping zones. When HA tries to figure out if you’re in a zone, and if so, which one, it has an algorithm to pick the “best” one if the device is in more than one.
I’m not guaranteeing how long I’ll support this custom component after it becomes standard (assuming it does.) I may not delete it, but at some point I won’t work on it to keep it working when things change and it breaks.
Shame they wouldn’t include that in the official component, it’s no use for me in UTC because I hate doing the math every time I look at times in the frontend
The shortest I could get it to do was 2 seconds, at 1 second I get ERROR (SyncWorker_11) [custom_components.life360.device_tracker] get_places: ValueError: Attempted to set connect timeout to 0.0, but the timeout cannot be set to a value less than or equal to 0.
I’m assuming it’ll only connect to the servers while driving or moving to get updates every 2 seconds? If not. that’d be a great feature.
I have my gpslogger set to 1 second (with tasker intents) while connected to car BT and 1 hr when not.
On a side note, why does it never show any address for me? They call it the sticks where I live but it’s still on google maps
It didn’t for me either so I switched to using the Places Custom Component for addresses (which I think works better for me as it uses the lat/lon from the Composite Device tracker which also takes Google as an input so is sometimes more up to date than Life360).
My guess is that the Life360 server/api isn’t passing it anymore because I am sure it used to work.
Cool thanks. Got a link to that custom component?
I’m currently using google_travel_time component and it’s been great. It would’ve been nice to have that feature in the life360 So I can cut down on components
To be fair, I chose to remove that feature before submitting it. I didn’t want to burden everyone with having timezonefinderL and numpy installed, which are both quite large. Also, it makes more sense to be implemented elsewhere, such as in the Person component (or my composite component. I did this first in life360, then added it to composite. Had I been thinking I probably would only have done it in composite to begin with.)
Oh, yeah, that’s because of how I was setting the network timeout. That is changed in what I’m submitting. But, I’m thinking of making a lower limit of 10 (maybe 5) seconds. This is already using an unofficial API, and I don’t want to do anything to draw their attention to that. If everyone starts hitting their server every second…
No, it always queries the server at the rate requested. Life360 itself, however, I believe updates (the data on the server) more frequently when it detects the device is moving than when it’s stationary. So, in effect, HA will see more updates when the device is moving than when it’s stationary.
That’s a question for Life360. My component just displays what it gets from the Life360 server. I definitely get addresses.
Well, I hate to assume… You said that the device would not be defined under device_tracker so I just wanted to verify how the device was going to appear in HA.
This is so cool!
I couldn’t find an official component for Life360 (haven’t read all of the 947 comments).
What is the current way of setting up Life360 tracking in HA?
From what I’ve read it has changed over time.
DrZzs did a really nice one a while back. Unfortunately the step by step install instructions were out of date within a few days of it being published as I recall.
hello, lately home assistant is slow to recognize that I come home, in the life 360 app I recognize well, it seems that it takes to send the information to HA, it may be due to some change in the latest version. A greeting and thank you very much for your excellent work
I agree with this, performance does seem to have become worse recently but I expect @pnbruckner will respond (rightly) that his component can only use the information that Life360 sends.
Remember Life360 and HA may determine “Home” differently, which strongly depends on your HA configuration (life360, zones, etc.) This is discussed in detail on the doc page. And even if you have things set up optimally, they are still two different systems with two potentially different algorithms. And there is always at least some delay due to the polling nature (which, again, depends on your HA configuration.)
And, yes, the HA life360 tracker only knows what it gets from the Life360 server.
Note that in the version I’m submitting to become a standard integration things will be a bit simpler, but will still depend on setting up HA’s zone.home to match Life360’s “Home Place” (which, unfortunately, will require configuring it manually since the feature to automatically maintain HA zones has been dropped.)
If you want to see more of what’s going on, set logger to debug and look in home-assistant.log. There will be debug messages to indicate when life360 device_trackers are updated, and if updates are skipped due to insufficient GPS accuracy (which, BTW, is another HA configuration item that can cause this.)
What is the location and radius of zone.home in HA? And what is the location and radius of the Place in Life360 that corresponds to your home? (You don’t need to show the specifics here. You just need to look at them to see if they are the same or not.) Have you read this?
Also, you have max_update_wait set for 15 minutes. Are you getting any events indicating the devices are taking longer than 15 minutes to update?
Practically speaking, I guess it depends on your system. Also don’t forget the shorter you make this the more frequently it will be hitting the Life360 server. I personally wouldn’t go any lower than 5 to 10 seconds.
