I have been trying to use the TP-Link integration for my router to alert HA when my (and families) phones log on to the network, its for home presence detection as my setup is so that the home is pretty much disabled when I am not home.
It was working fine on my mobile (Pixel6) but as it cannot use the MAC address and most iPhones log in as plain “iPhone” it makes it pretty useless really for my needs.
Is there any sensible, workable presence detection out there I could use?
IP address is no good either as mobiles would be dynamic not static.
Have you tried renaming the device(s) in the companion app? I don’t use TP-Link but my household’s iphones have unique names and device tracking works perfectly via the Unifi integration.
That’s fixable though, you can set a static ip either on the router or the device itself?
There’s always the GPS tracking feature in the companion app aswell.
Sadly they don’t (and probably wont) run the companion app
I could assign a static IP but as yet I can’t see the IP address in the TP-Link integration, not saying its not there just i cant find it in Node-red yet.
It complicates things not being able to install the companion app. Of the top of my head some other possible solutions could be BLE tracking (you would need the IRK pr phone).
I haven’t tried pinging iphones, would a ping sensor work?
PS: They don’t need to actively use the companion app to have it integrated into HA.
You could manually configure IPs on the devices or your router if you want to have static ips. No it is not possible to exclude users from accessing devices.
Just tried using the “Wifi connection” in HA app settings on my phone - it shows up nicely in node red with my network name but when turning off wifi on my phone it still showed the SSID even after a minute or more, should it disconnect??
Edit - been turned off over 5mins now and node red still shows the phone as connected so I don’t think this will help me at all.
As a little update, some reading turned up a HACS integration titled “iphonedetect” which seems to offer a possibility and although it states iphone in its title, it uses mDNS which is available on most phone os’ now so should be ok with my Android etc
An alternative option and something I’ve used before with success is the Traccar Client integration. As long as the phone has mobile service, download the Traccar Client app on the phone. The integration gives you a webhook URL to use in the app and voila! A decent device tracker ready to go.
I have read several solutions for this and I also tried many Solutions that never were satisfying, especially when you are “asking” people to set something up in settings that they never would do for themselves/never saw.
People will spin their eyes if you require them to traverse through 10 menupoints, resulting in a loss in “acceptance factor”.
Needs static IP, private IP disabled → if you change Wifi name or if something changes in the setup you need to reconfigure it always and people become annoyed (+ you)
Just a clarification:
For security reasons (specifically to thwart what you are doing - tracking - which can also be construed as stalking or privacy invasion if you don’t have permission) most modern phones have random MAC assignments as a default setting, to allocate a random MAC address each connection time. This can be over-ridden to be static in the phone network settings - a one-off change, which then also gives you the added functionality of being able to consistently allocate a Static IP Address as well.
Your ultimate goal, to see when somebody is home or not, is frequently reported here in these forums as a problem using connection and disconnection flags from the router, and other methods and apps are often used instead.
