Life360 Installation

I am an 80 year-old guy living in Florida. Before I retired, I spent 30 years programming large scale IBM mainframes with additional experience in Univac, Honeywell and CDC operating systems. I am fluent in most of the languages used by those operating systems. That being said, I find the instructions to install Life360 to be virtually unintelligible. URLs referenced don’t exist. Copying and pasting GitHub - pnbruckner/ha-life360: A Home Assistant integration for Life360. into the HACS Custom Integrations does nothing. I am not sure what the “config file directory” is. I have downloaded and unzipped pnbruckner/ha-life360, but there are no directions on how to load it into HACS. Can anyone explain to me in words of two or fewer syllables how to get this thing to work?

Thanks.

English should be good enough :+1:

What happens of you follow the described install procedure? :page_facing_up:

You might also find the hacs docs (especially about custom repos) useful :point_down:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/explain-to-me-in-words-of-two-GOTuEnwpTKyd7JWjBWqdtw

My bad. By saying that I was fluent in “most of these language,” I was referring to my ability to understand most “of the computerese” of the day. Sadly, (or happily, depending on your viewpoint) technology has evolved to the point that I find myself less than knowledgeable in today’s operating systems, and programming languages such as Python and Java. Recently, I have mastered enough know-how to install Home Assistant on a new computer and to install a new hard drive in my laptop and install Window 11 on it. I am, however, stymied by installing Life360. Your reply to my post implies that I must be a compete moron to be unable to perform what I sense you conceive to be a simple task. I sympathize. I. Have taught classes in the (now ancient) mainframe language of Focus and found myself completely unable to understand why these yoyos could not grasp what to me were the most basic concepts. Be that as it may, after an entire day of struggles, I have still been unable to get Life360 to work. I am off to the bar. Couple of dry martinis should do the trick. Thanks for your reply. I will read the documents you included as soon as I sober up.

One more thing. I have tried all of the installation procedures you reference. The first, “install Procedure” recommends doing a standard Home Assistant integration install. The problem is that there is no Life360 integration. The second basically says “Try the same thing.” The third recommends procedures that make no sense to me. It says to download and unzip GitHub - pnbruckner/ha-life360: A Home Assistant integration for Life360.. I did that, but there are no clear instructions on what to do with the files once they are in your computer’s files. Even Hubitat’s directions for custom integration installation were crystal clear compared to these.

Good day. The offficial integration was removed last year because life360 kept messing around with the api.
The only working one i believe is this GitHub - pnbruckner/ha-life360: A Home Assistant integration for Life360..

You just need to copy the url as a custom repository into Hacs.

Go to hacs, select the 3 dots in the right corner, select custom repository, paste the url, select it as integration.

Then back to hacs it should now appear as life360, install, restart home assistant.

After that go to settings>devices and services> type life360 install it and configure

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@Jlvowell

I’m a 65-year-old guy. I haven’t yet retired, but I have been programming since the late 1970’s. (Ever hear of Heathkit?) I’ve programmed microcomputers up to CDC Cybers, in binary code, assembly language, FORTRAN, Pascal, PathPascal, PL/M, C, C++ & some others I don’t even remember anymore. Lately, of course, I’ve also been programming in Python.

The issue isn’t general programming or OS experience. It’s just Home Assistant & HACS learning curve. I tried to write the Life360 custom integration documentation to make installation & configuration as easy as possible. But I do understand without some amount of HA & HACS experience, it can be a bit confusing.

There are three basic steps:

  1. Get the custom integration files into HA’s config/custom_components folder.
  2. Restart HA so it recognizes the integration is installed.
  3. Add a “configuration entry” for the integration.

The first step can be achieved several ways. The easiest is using HACS. But since HACS is a “whole thing” in itself, and it has evolved significantly over the years, I did not attempt to document every individual step of how to use HACS to install a custom integration as a custom repository. (The instructions would have to change all the time, and I gave up trying to keep up with HACS a long time ago.) But if you go to the Installation → Procedure → With HACS (click the triangle to expand) section of the Life360 custom integration documentation, and click the big, blue “OPEN HACS REPOSITORY ON MY” button under step 1, that should do most, if not all, of the work of getting the Life360 custom integration copied into HA’s config/custom_components folder. (Although I think you may have to download it, too. Again, these are HACS details, and I very seldom use HACS myself.)

Then restart HA.

Now go to the Configuration → Add Integration Entry part of the Life360 custom integration docs. Again, there’s a nice, big, blue “My” button to click (in this case, “ADD INTEGRATION TO MY”.) Follow the prompts, and when you’re done, it should be good to go.

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Thank you very mmuch for your reply. Couple of questions:

  1. I have tried using the HACS custom repositories option, entered “GitHub.com/pnbruckner/ha-life360,” selecting “integration” as the type and cliicking “Add.” Nothing happens. No error message or any other indication of complettion.
  2. I have downloaded the HA-LIFE360 folder to my Files folder in IOS. There appear to be 10 individual file in this folder. Do I copy each file individually to the Custom Components folder in HA or copy HA-LIFE360 in its entirity?

I am sure that you and the other users who have been kind enough to provide guidance for me have been wondering, “Why can’t this moron understand these directions? A two-year old child can get this.” The answer is that I pretty much do everything on my iPad. It turns out that, if I simply go to my laptop aand follow the HACS installation directions, it works without a problem.

Again, thanks so much for your help. I really am not a complete imbecille - just a very old one.

No problem. As I said, it’s just learning curve, and HA & HACS learning curves are pretty steep. (Believe it or not, they were much steeper just a couple of years ago.)

FWIW, HACS already knows about a lot of custom integrations. But I never submitted any of mine for inclusion. So, you can’t just install it with HACS. You first have to tell HACS about it by adding the custom repository. Once that’s done, THEN you have to install (aka download) the integration. Then you have to restart HA. Then you have to add the configuration entry (which itself is a confusing step, because the button is labeled “ADD INTEGRATION”, not “ADD INTEGRATION CONIGURATION ENTRY”, so it sounds like you have to “add” [install] the integration, right after you just got done doing that! :wink: )

I now have an integration for Life360, but I don’t know what to do with it. is there documentation that shows how to use iy in automations?

Thanks.

The integration’s main purpose is to create device_tracker entities.

For each account you registered (while configuring the Life360 integration), it will see what Life360 Circles that account (or those accounts) are in. And then for each of those Life360 Circles it will see which Life360 Members are in those Circles. For each unique Life360 Member, the integration will create a device_tracker entity.

So, first question is, do you see any of these entities? Go to the Developer Tools → STATES page. In the “Filter entities” box, enter device_tracker.life360. Do you see any entities? Alternatively, go to the Settings → Devices & services → Life360 page. How many entities does it say there are? If you click on the entities, you should see at least a binary_sensor entity for each registered account. There should also be one device_tracker entity for each Member it found.

Once you have device_tracker entities, then you can use them like any other device_tracker entities. That is a “HA question”, not really a “Life360 integration” question.

Thank you so much for all your help. I have two last questions and then I won’t bother you again. First, when adding Life360, one of the parameters you have to fill in is “Max GPS accuracy.” Should this be 500 or 5, or something in between? Second, when I go to Settings>Entries and search on “John’s iPhone 15,” there it is - tracking_device. But, in Create Automation > Entry > State, it does not appear in the drop-down list of entities. Any idea why not?

Sorry. I meant device_tracker, not tracking_device. My bad.

Did you read the description of this option? In my experience, “reasonable” accuracy values are anything about 100 meters or below. Therefore, I’ve set this option in my system to 100.

However, it really depends on your situation, which is why it is configurable. E.g., do you live in a very rural area with poor cell phone coverage? In that case, you might want to use a larger number (i.e., accept less accurate GPS fixes.) Or do you have automations that depend on fairly accurate location updates? In that case, you might want to use a smaller number (i.e., accept only more accurate GPS fixes.)

No, I don’t. I just went to Settings → Automations & scenes, clicked on CREATE AUTOMATION → Create new automation, clicked on ADD TRIGGER → Entity → State, then clicked on the Entity field, and all my Life360 (and other) device_tracker entities were in the list. FWIW, it is a “combo-box”, meaning you can type the name of the entity, or click an item in the list. If you start typing device_tracker.life360, you should see all the tracker entities created by the Life360 integration.

Here’s one that you probably cannot help me with, but I thought I would give it a shot and see. Somehow, in installing Life360, I have ended up with two entities with the same entity id. Needless to say, this causes confusion in automations. I have found no way to delete one of the entities. Any ideas?

Again, thank you so much for all your help.

In general, that shouldn’t be possible. What is the duplicated entity ID, and where exactly do you see it twice?

After several false starts, I have finally gotten L360 up and running. It appears that it will do exactly what I need. Thank you again for all your help and advice. No more duplicates. No more problems.

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