How stable is owntracks for you all android users? It seems to work fine most of the time, but not reporting much at other occasions. It also seem to give up trying to connect if something goes wrong with its connection at one time.
I’m on the verge of skipping the app altogether and instead use tasker to create location reports (using a mqtt plugin).
I’ve been using it since I started last year and while I’ve had to work with it a bit, tuning the radius and making sure it updates properly, I’m fairly happy with it. But I also use I BLE beacon to mark home (located on the side of the house by the driveway) with it which improved my home detection times.
It will be interesting to see if and how this may change when I change phones in a week. I’m moving from a Droid Turbo on Verizon to a Nexus 6P on Project Fi - so anything could happen!
If I do have issues I will likely consider moving to GPS Logger, which I have heard good things about. You may want to look into that if OT isn’t cutting it for you.
Sorry to semi hijack your thread…but wouldn’t it kill your phone battery if using owntracks? Hate to keep turning GPS on/off as I can’t afford to turn it on all day. Did I miss something?
I’ve never noticed a drain, but then I run a custom rom so the tuning that the dev did may bias my results. I do see threads from people who have had issues with battery, but many of them were also using incorrect settings.
If you’re asking for an opinion based on my own experiences and what I have seen as a mod, I’d say that it wasn’t a major issue. Connectivity - especially if you are using a cloud based mqtt - and reliability/preciseness seems to be more of an issue.
I’m moving phones next week and I’m considering looking at GPSLogger.
Thanks, I might look into that.
Owntracks isn’t that hard on your battery. You can select what kind of location tracking you want to use when the app is in the background and forground.
I have it set to low energy when in the background, so it will use only locations by scanning for wifi and cell towers and not use the gps.
It’s really not rock solid… Like you if for some reason it couldn’t connect to the server, it will not try again…
Really frustrating.
interesting read : https://github.com/owntracks/android/issues/469
You might want to try this : https://home-assistant.io/components/device_tracker.gpslogger/
or https://home-assistant.io/components/device_tracker.locative/
or even this : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.barbaro.zanzito
(For now i didn’t switched yet)
It isn’t stable for me. I have to use the clear session option, and I cannot use websockets (use a Mosquitto MQTT server). I see that I am constantly entering and leaving zones all day.
Seems like it sleeps or something, that causes me to “leave” and when it wakes, I “enter”. I also have some issues with other apps, not getting notifications, so maybe that is a phone problem. S7 on ATT.
Do you have any ‘battery saving’ or ‘task killing’ apps? Cause that is the first thing that should go.
Nope, nothing like that.
Looks like Locative is shutting down tomorrow, at least the cloud part:
The mobile apps will remain in their stores for refernce reasons and can be used (without the cloud features). Locative Cloud will be shut-down effectively Sunday, 14th of May 2017. Registrations have been disabled already and, once shut down, all your data will be deleted irrevocably.
I am using owntracks with a free mqtt broker cloud but this does seem to work extremely poorly. Location information in HA is most of the time not accurate. I have not yet dig into this problem. But the first setup I made is highly unreliable.
Could the settings on your power management be turning off wifi or synching when your phone sleeps?
I tried OwnTracks for some time but found it just too unreliable. I changed over to Bluetooth and have seen great improvements.
Hi Mate,
can you please elaborate when you say switched to bluetootth, what does your setup now consist of?
I switched from owntracks to tasker btw.
I made a profile (A) emulating the owntracks mqtt message. It is using only the network location %LOCN and sends my location every five minutes, but only if the precision %LOCNACC is under a treshold I choose (200m in my case). This way I only get reports from wifi, and not using phone towers.
A second profile turns (A) off when my wifi connects + send an extra location report at that event.
When wifi disconnects it turns the profile (A) on again.
So far everything seems to work fine this way.
I now only use the Bluetooth device tracker and it works well. We have two phones that that are tracked and the Pi that runs HA always picks up the phones when we arrive and park on the drive. It has been the most reliable device tracker for arming and disarming our alarm and other automations that rely on presence. The only downside is that you cannot track where the phones are when away from home like you can with Owntracks but this is not a requirement we need.
Hope this explains further.
You know, it’s funny; I had OT on my Droid Turbo and it was reliable for the most part but not consistently. I was thinking of moving to another platform but in the interim I moved off of Verizon and the Droid to GoogleFi and a Nexus 6P and since I installed OT on it, it’s been pretty much dead on and stable.
My only problem with owntracks is if I stop at the shop down the road on my way home. It’s far enough away that it doesn’t mark me as home (which is correct), but then when I go home I haven’t moved far enough for owntracks to update the location so I’m still showing at the shop and not_home (which is bad).
I’m loathed to increase the size of my home zone and would rather configure owntracks to notice the movement, but that doesn’t seem possible. I’m still mulling it over, but the final solution will be a bigger home zone to be big enough that if I stop just outside it, and then go home it registers as a big enough move on owntracks to update the location.
Unless anybody has a better option??
Other than that it’s been pretty reliable tbh.
I use a combination of a bunch of device trackers with my Nexus 6P (and my wife’s Nexus 5X) and lump them in a group. The group goes to ‘home’ when any one of them arrives.
I use OwnTracks via CloudMQTT. Also have an iBeacon I bought on Amazon setup as a region within OwnTracks. Has worked well so far, mainly from the iBeacon.
I also use the Raspberry Pi 3 Bluetooth tracker. I put the Bluetooth mac address into the same known devices profile as Owntracks.
I then also use the AsusWRT device tracker to pick up if I connect to wifi.
I have played with GPS Logger and it seems really delayed sometimes and the locations between the two are a half mile off sometimes. If GPS logger supported iBeacons it would be the best option hands down as this is usually what triggers me as home right now. Would also love to get away from CloudMQTT.
Have also tested Zanzito a little but the location tracking seems to need a little work.
I also think Bluetooth would be a better tracker for me to know that I have arrived if my RPi wasnt so far from my driveway. Dont have any options to move it closer.
On a side note, the group method works well, but, theoretically I could see a situation where one device tracker doesn’t work (e.g. AsusWRT fails to connect). Then, if one device is never marked as ‘not_home’ then I would never truly be marked as away for automations.
I’m using the exact same setup! But I haven’t added the RPi BT into the mix; I even have a BLE USB adapter I bought on sale when I got the iBeacon but never implemented it.
Do you think the BT tracker on the Pi made an appreciable difference? I’m getting pretty good results at the moment and my iBeacon has held up over the Winter really well (mounted outside on house near garage).