Multiple Device Tracker Priority

[BlinkyLights]

While the documentation states you can just stack or combine device trackers, it appears they like to flap however if they disagree if you are in a zone or not however.

I am currently using both the Unifi and the iOS app for location on my iPhones. The GPS tends to drift when inside because it can’t get a signal so using Unifi ensures the device states HOME, it also helps if someone fails to launch the app for a while and it doesn’t update. However here is the problem.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to say which app has location priority or to prevent one from over writing the other.

This seems to cause home / not_home flapping when walking away from my house as one will perform an update then the other sometimes.

What I propose is two new settings for the device trackers source types.

1. A accuracy / priority metric for source type, this would indicate that one type of update has a higher accuracy than another.

2. Based on the above maybe an update protection time window based on source type is needed to deal with figuring out what is the current location… If Beacon had a 5min window and router or gps went to update the location during that window they would skip that update to prevent flapping.

[RobDYI]

This might help

Presence detection with multiple devices & multiple trackers

Presence is one of the cornerstones of a good home automation system. HomeAssistant offers multiple methods of detecting presence. Unfortunately, however, any single method is far from reliable. Like most of you, I struggled a multiple presence detection methods to improve the wife acceptance factor. After lot of iterations, I (think) have the perfect system that detects presence very reliably and I thought of sharing the same with you. Given that any one method is not entirely reliable, I use …

[BlinkyLights]

I like your work around, however looking at your for condtion it seems like you have the same problem with the current implementation… The need for one indicator to override another but ONLY if a specific amount of time has passed.

Administratively that is a lot of automation syntax to just STACK a bunch of presence detection priority.

That is why I made the feature request… It seems like it should be important and built in.

[SirJohnDoe]

What’s missing for me is the following:

• You don’t get to decide which device tracker gets priority, i.e. what if you have multiple device trackers: one you have with you (an incidental tracker so to say), but another one updates which isn’t with you (i.e. your phone). The state will be wrong. So the incidental device tracker should have priority instead of the stationary one, or the last updated one.
• When using multiple device trackers with a person, you can’t decide when to trigger home or not_home. The order is decided by HA. A possibility is using the device tracker group with the ‘all’ option, but this is not supported in the UI, and the domain is not device tracker so it can’t be linked to a person.