Newbie, ASUSWRT not detecting away

Configuration
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I’m a total HA newbie, and have a very basic setup installed on my Beaglebone. Installation was straightforward and painless. The “discovery” found my Roku (how do I remove it without disabling discovery?) and the sun component sees correct in its information, so I’m pretty sure the basic installation is OK.

I then installed the ASUSWRT component and after updating my RT-AC56U to the latest firmware and rebooting it, the known_devices.yaml seemed to list everything that was connected. I then set track: no for all but our two cell phones. If I turn wifi on and off it seems to detect my LG Volt (Android 4.4.4) coming and going as expected.

It detected my wife’s One Plus One phone (Android 6) as soon as she walked onto the patio, and I then edited the known_devices file again to give it a better name and restarted HA. Unfortunately its never marked it as away. I’ve verified there is no MAC entry for it in the Asus router devices table after she left.

Any ideas as to what is going wrong here?

The ultimate goal is to use this detection to set “not at home” mode in my custom alarm software running on the Beaglebone (debian 8.4), I plan to have HA send MQTT messages, as I already have mosquito working on the Beaglebone. Using our cell phones and WiFi password (very strong) as an “electronic lock” seems very slick and better than any option I’d come up with before stumbling onto Home Assistant. I’d though of text messaging, but too easily spoofed, and wired key-switch but we really don’t need anymore keys to fumble with and secure wiring would be a PITA.

1 Like
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I have a bit of new information to add. The One Plus One (android 6) connects using 5GHz WiFi. It comes and goes if I enable/disable WiFi in the settings, but when I take it out of range, it doesn’t detect as away.

Ideas?

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Removed the ASUSWRT component and tried NMAP.

It doesn’t work reliably either. When it does work its way too slow to detect the transition from away to home. For my intended use I can tolerate a few minute delay in detecting home to away transition, but not the other way around.

Would have been a slick solution if it worked, but it looks like HA is not going to be useful for me.

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I see this with I-Phone too. Eventually it will mark the I-phone away but it is anywhere from 30 minutes to 12 hours delayed, and yes the ASUS is not showing the MAC address anymore. I’m using a RTN-16. Fortunately the Android phones all work well for me but I don’t have anything less than 6 months old.

Calvin

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The idea is clever. I think I’ll use it, by having my router assign a fixed IP based on the phone’s MAC and detect if they are in range or not by adding some ICMP code in the event loop of alarm program running on the Beaglebone as pings to the phone IP work or not depending on if its in range.

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I have an iPhone - for presence locative is rock solid.