I have an automatic gate that is on a busy road with no mobile phone reception nearby.
There are 3 directions we could approach home from and 2 of them are working with a 10km range for my home zone in Owntracks. There is enough reception at that distance and we do not stop or visit many places within this radius so it doesn’t make much of a problem having such a large radius.
The problem is with the 3rd direction. It is the most traveled direction and most important to me. The reception along the road is very poor and only occasionally picks up signal. The last few test runs I have done have not sent the entering zone mqtt from owntracks to home and I arrive with the gate closed.
Some possible solutions I have thought about but do not yet know enough about:
Is there a way to force owntracks to report signal more frequently in certain areas? I.e. when approaching or inside a region. Will bringing Owntracks to the foreground achieve this?
Can I set up 2 small zones along the road very close to the town I will be leaving before I head for home and use these as a trigger. When I pass through both zones in a certain direction it will mean I am on my way home.
Is there an way I can track where I am and where I have a data connection along the road and overlay this on the map so I can make a better judgement of which course to take?
How long will Owntracks need a connection pop up for it to make a report on entering a region?
Has anyone done anything similar or got any ideas that could help?
Can you extend your WiFi to near your gate? There are various products that can help you do that (including from Unifi). That would be the best approach.
As for zones - if they always trigger in a specific order, then you can use a trigger of your first zone, and a wait template of the second zone within a fixed time.
The wifi is at the gate, I use a sonoff SV to open it (wifi connected). The gate takes 30 seconds to open and it its a busy high speed road, I would need to activate it 1 mile down the road for it to be open by the time I get to the gate so I don’t think I can use wifi.
Cascading the zones is the way to go, but I will still need to make sure owntracks activates them before travelling into the dead zone of mobile phone reception, this is what I am worried about.
Just an idea: instead of Owntracks use Google Location Sharing. Just for comparison, perhaps it is more accurate because it uses more sensors. You might get more accurate zoning. Just an idea.
You could use a 4G network monitor app to map the dead zones. E.g.
He would require an external antenna to achieve this over LoRa both on the car and the gate/house.
Not a terrible idea when you are limited in options though.
I would also consider purchasing a cellular booster for you car if you’re in the states nexitivity have a device called the cel-fi go which is vehicle applications if you were in Australia I could get you a model that you could take out of the car and into the house with you so you had cellular at home also.
Yes I sort of have. It could be an ideal solution to this problem. But for the time, effort and expense to get 1 device working I don’t think it is worth it for me. There is a possibility it could be blocked by the same mountains as the mobile reception too so all that for nothing
Although my problem is mainly with my mobile phone reception, it has passed that problem onto owntracks and its update frequency. I have seen other people having outdated data with owntracks and they tried Zanzito.
It has a 1 hour free trial but but that doesn’t really work for me when I have to test it far away.
I have used macrodroid with a geofence with some success. I can set the update frequency very low and it can detect when I am in certain pockets of reception along the road (but still 10km away). I am going to play around with it and I should be able to get it to realise I am on the way home and not going out (with 2 zones). Also I will set another macro to lower the update frequency when I am not in the car to preserve battery life. I should be able to delay the gate so it opens just before I arrive home as well so it itsn’t sat there open for 10minutes.
So I have come up with a workaround to the problem.
I set the home zone to 12km radius which covers a few areas of decent mobile phone reception and I have changed the advanced settings in Owntracks. I have set the background displacement to 75m and the background interval to 120s. This has been enough to trigger the entering of the zone everytime before I lose mobile reception. The downside is I will use more battery. I will test a few other settings to find the sweet spot. I expect I could increse the displacement substantially but most times I move more than 75m I am driving and on charge so no harm done. The interval is probably what kills my battery most and I will play with this setting.
I was hoping I could change these settings like I can in macrodroid (but no MQTT with this app so it dosen’t work for this purpose) and change location update frequency based on another factor, eg when connected to car bluetooth and/or on charge. Maybe it is possible with tasker or some app like that.
Thanks for the suggestion, but there is literally no signal at all, so it’s not possible to boost it and it would need to be in everyone’s car, so I would need 3 devices!
