Persons reporting unknown

I have created a person and the state while in a zone named work reports as unknown.

I currently have one device tracker, owntracks on my phone that is associated to my person and the device tracker itself reports that it’s at work however the persons state is unknown.

Hoping someone could explain what is happening and if there is a potential fix.

Thanks!

You should read this

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I’m having the same issue. It’s new for me in 0.94.0. I think it has something to do with this:

Modernizing the device tracker

This release also introduces a long overdue overhaul of how the device tracker works. We are introducing this overhaul piece by piece, focusing first on device tracker platforms that push their updates to Home Assistant: mobile app, OwnTracks, GeoFency, GPSLogger and Locative.

These integrations will no longer use known_devices.yaml but instead use entities, like all other integrations in Home Assistant. You can change the name and entity ID via the UI. It is no longer posible to merge the devices with other device tracker entities. This was flaky at best. You should now use the new person integration for this.

But I don’t understand how to fix it yet.

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@teslas_moustache

That’s the conclusion I came to after trying several other fixes from other forums posts which have so far not resolved the issue.

I’ll be sure to report back if I figure it out.

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likewise…

I´m having the same issue, only thing is that i´m using the location service of the Ariela app, and as you say, the Entity reports the location correctly but I added the device_tracker.motorola_one entity to the person entity and it didn´t work.

this is what I added to the configuration.yaml file:

homeassistant:
  customize: !include customize.yaml

and this is what I added to the customize.yaml file:

person.carlos_andres_zapata_cuervo:
  device_trackers:
  - device_tracker.motorola_one

am I doing something wrong or is this just an issue for the person entity?
(I´ll post an update if I have any luck, thanks in advance…)

hey, I found a workarond for my case (don´t know if it works for you but here it goes)

I went to the /config/.storage/person file and set the tracking device directly in there, and it worked!

{
    "data": {
        "persons": [
            {
                "device_trackers": [
                    "device_tracker.motorola_one"
                ],
                "id": "********************************",
                "name": "Carlos Andr\u00e9s Zapata Cuervo",
                "user_id": "********************************"
            }
        ]
    },
    "key": "person",
    "version": 1
}

let me know if it works for you…

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Why would you add it to the customize file?

Why wouldn’t you just use the frontend to make this change?

Why would you add it to the customize file?

That´s what I saw in several youtube tutorials.

Why wouldn’t you just use the frontend to make this change?

I tried but it was like stuck with the tracking device, I change it a million times and it didn´t work so I had to do it manually…

You should probably use the official documentation instead.

stuck with what tracking device?

I used Person - Home Assistant and it was confusing because it duplicated my already existing user and the system was going nuts.

a previous tracking device that was created when I installed Home Assistant and logged in for the first time (2 days ago), I delete it because it just showed my location as in home always, so I tried to add the tracking device created when installed the Ariela app in my Android Phone (because that one is working flawlessly) but niether the frontend nor the config file worked…

You need to pick one OR the other, not both. You do not want the config in 2 places. Personally I prefer the frontend GUI for managing persons. I am guessing your issue was that you were trying to define it in too many places. Keep it simple.

I tried front end first as the novice that I am, it didn´t worked, after reading the documentation and watching some videos I modified the configuration.yaml file and that didn´t worked either and after searching around I found the persons file and that finally worked so don´t judge me for trying all that I can to make things work :slight_smile:

I’m not judging. I was asking for reasons WHY you went the route you went.

The thing about the persons file, is that the GUI editor is editing that particular file. I don’t understand what you mean when you say the old device was stuck. There is what I would call a bug in the frontend editor, when you try to delete a device using the little X next to it, it doesn’t go away, but you can put the cursor in the box and delete the entry in there. It sounds like you may have run into that.

The reason I was asking, is because you shouldn’t edit those files in the .storage directory while the system is running. You should always shut down HA first. By editing the file directly, you merely did what the frontend does.

If you came across a REAL bug, then you need to report it, and not just work around it. If you indeed had a bug, it needs to be fixed.

you should show the people the way to do things instead of complain for people’s ways of doing things, keep that in mind…

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but you posted a solution that isn’t the proper way to do things. It just happened to work for you, keep that in mind…

as I stated in my post, it was what worked for me… I wasn’t aware that posting solutions that involved modifying the persons file was something ILEGAL, so I apologize if that´s the case, what I´m saying is that there are better ways to say things, if you had told me that from the beginning, things would be different…

adding to the above and the proper way of doing things, answering you here: yes, I fear that is not correct…

if you read the documentation on Person, you should find this:

person:
  - name: Marijn
    id: theboss
    user_id: 3a8d4_redacted_3
    device_trackers:
      - device_tracker.life360_marijn

is the syntax it needs if you use yaml files for configuring Person, and not use the UI (as I do).

the user id can be found under the /configuration/user/name

customization can be set in that same way:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    person.marijn:
      templates:
        entity_picture: >
          return entities['sensor.marijn_picture'].state ;

just to keep things clean, Ive put all my persons in a package :wink:

thanks for the answer man.

I tried that solution but when I added the code to the configuration.yaml i got an error that stated duplicity on the users, so I had to remove that, this is what I added:

person:
  - name: carlos_andres_zapata_cuervo
    friendly_name: Andrés
    id: 87d713b9a986429f8b0d5ad4688f1efe
    user_id: 87d713b9a986429f8b0d5ad4688f1efe
    device_trackers:
      - device_tracker.motorola_one

maybe give https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/person/ another read. No such thing a friendly_name listed.
should lead to an error probably, so that could be worth filing an issue.

Id also rename the id to something more humanly understandable. maybe using identical id and user_id causes the error?