Does anyone have a good suggestion for tracking location in HA without a phone w/ the HA app? We would like to be able to see the approximate location of our child at a reasonable interval when away from home with a caretaker. We use Android phones in our homes.
I looked at all the Bluetooth tracker options. My understanding is that AirTags require a manual refresh or always-unlocked Apple device to pass the location. I haven’t seen a way to integrate the Google Find My Device network aside from an iFrame that requires the viewer to be logged in to an account with access. The Tile integration seems to no longer work. I haven’t seen any Bluetooth trackers that use a network robust enough to be reliable (Apple, Google, or Life360) that also integrate.
We are hoping to avoid the GPS/cellular devices with monthly subscriptions. Most of the tracking we care about is away from home, so local BLE tracking doesn’t help.
I was surprised some clever people in the community haven’t figured out a way to do this yet. But I’ve been trying to come up with ideas and have been stumped.
Does anyone have a suggestion or solution that I’ve missed?
Tile is not dead yet.
I used an old Tile in my son’s bag to know if he was home or not, but a few times it updated with the position of the school.
So someone at school used the app.
Google now has a “Find My Devices” network similar to Apple’s. Both are based on the idea that phones passively detect BLE broadcasts and, if they are from a tracker tag, upload the location anonymously. Neither requires a device to be always-unlocked or an app installed / manually refreshed, everything happens in the background seamlessly as long as bluetooth is enabled — which is what makes these networks superior to Life360 / Tile, which require the anonymous phones to have an app installed and running.
Your Android phone will have access to all your tags’ locations, but I don’t see a way to feed these updates into HA as of today (tasker, maybe?). Even with AirTags, although their position is uploaded to iCloud, it is not part of the family sharing API used by iCloud3 integration. Both networks are highly concerned about privacy and illicit use, given how affordable they are, so the APIs relatively locked down.
For an annual fee, you can purchase a prepaid SIM card for a cheap Android phone running OwnTracks or Locative which posts to a (private) server at set intervals. I used an Invoxia GPS tracker on my eBike, which uses 4g cellular and lasted about 3 months on a charge. The subscription fee just went up, but still only $67 a year, and there is a 3rd-party integration to get the data from the Cloud to HA.
Have a look at the Bermuda integration, which works with any Bluetooth tracker (I have three from Tile!). It provides Home/Away data as well as room presence.
Yeah, I’m well aware of the Google network. But my hope was to integrate with HA in one device. For home/away etc so the alarm doesn’t arm and HVAC go to away and all the lights stop working automatically when I leave and she’s at home with our son.
Maybe I should give up and go for a device tracker and a separate home/away detection. But I was hoping to do it all in one.
Bermuda is for locating devices in your home. The requirement is for
But think about it @bradarussell - you need connsctivity between whatever your child is carrying and your home assistant machine. Effectively that is going to need a cellular device, or something communicating through a cellular device. Aside from LoRaWan there is simply nothing else with the range you need.
One thought is to create a DIY device with a raspberry pi 2040 attached to a sim800 and a GPS chip. It wakes up every [time interval], gets a GPS fix and then sends an sms message with the location. Or something like that.