Presence: bluetooth and GPS

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1

Hi. I was testing bluetooth presence for a while and it is pretty good. I even had an automation which turned on and off alarm system based on presence.
But I need something more.

First is detecting family members out of home. Do not need something really precise, just to know someone left work (for future automations)

Second is again local. The house is a bit bigger than raspberry pi’s blue can reach. I do not want alarm system to turn on if phone is out of bluetooth coverage.

So I thought that second GPS tracker can help here. I want first detection at house to be done by bluetooth, so alarm system can turn off quickly and then I want to rely on location by GPS. Is it silly?
How can it be done?

And by the way, I am on ios, so I can use the app

2

There are several GPS-based trackers you can choose from. E.g., I created an integration with Life360, but there are other good ones as well. Once you decide on a GPS-based tracker that works well for you, I also created a custom component that can create a composite tracker that can combine GPS and Bluetooth based trackers to get the best from both.

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3

Decided to start with ios app and making a group (bluetooth and gps)
It kind of worked from first look (but ios app gps is not reliable for now), but I can not see the state under the icon

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As you can see, I am third one and here is my group:

argo_multi_tracker:
  name: Argo_multi_tracker
  view: no
  entities:
    - device_tracker.argishti
    - device_tracker.argo

So I would like to understand how to show a state of this group in UI

4

Any advices?
And do I need remote access for ios app presence to work? It thinks I am home all day. But I am not(10 hours out of home)

5

I don’t use the iOS app (I don’t have iPhones) so I can’t help you with that. You might want to start a new topic to ask for help getting that working.

6

So, can anyone else help?
Questions:

  1. How can I make group device tracker look like usual one (Can not see state)

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  1. Do ios app tracker and owntracks need remote access to be configured?
7

Hey,
I can only answer p2 - for iOS you do need remote access (better https).
For owntracks - you need to be able to deliver updates via mqtt into Home Assistant. There are several options to achieve this:

  • have an external mqtt broker where both your local Hass and owntracks can connect
  • open access to local mqtt broker from internet
  • (my case) have both local mqtt broker at home for Hass and all the smart devices + have a remote broker for owntracks and connect the two brokers in bridged mode (I host mosquito instance on VPS which connects to my home instance via VPN joining the two “domains” into one network).

But I had to give up owntracks in favour of Bluetooth tracker using rasp pi w zero + “presence” script (there is a huge thread about it on this forum) + nmap tracker. Works reliable so far.

Kostya

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8

Any ideas?