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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
I found better results from decreasing the size of my home zone rather than increasing it, but I may be misunderstanding your specific problem.
The problem seems to be that owntracks only updates the location if you move a certain distance, so even if I decrease the size of the home zone I still won’t have moved far enough to trigger an update when I move from the shop to my house, as I understand it.
So I think the only solution is to make the home zone big enough that if I stop just outside it, then owntracks updates the location, when I then go home I have moved far enough to trigger another update, upon which HA will then mark me as home.
Or am I not on the right page?
I’m honestly going to have to sit down and do some research. You may well be right. Let me see what I can find out.
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I’ll await your findings 
I can’t find anything one way or the other so far. I’d say your idea seems logical to me and worth trying.
I did find some interesting stuff in this thread which might be worth a read. Not specific to your use case but you may see some info that’s useful if you can make a link…
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I dont know for sure. I haven’t tried to figure out if BT or the iBeacon picks up first. I assume the iBeacon does because its in my garage which is way closer than my RPi.
