Presence Detection on a non-exposed setup

Hello, my apologies if this was covered somewhere else I couldn’t seem to find anything when searching. I am currently setting up presence detection on Hassio. I have it working with Bluetooth and Ping but wanted to add a few other options to help with accuracy. I am looking for a solution that works without having to expose my system to the outside. I have tried to setup Google Location Sharing but it seems to have stopped working with the latest releases of Hassio. I have thought about using the location applet in IFTTT but do not know how to make it trigger an event in Home Assistant. I was hoping that I could have IFTTT send a message through something like Slack to trigger an event in Home Assistant. It appears most of the GPS tracking solutions require you have your system exposed to the internet.

Thanks in advanced.

I find BT is very accurate but my home is a very small studio flat so you may need more coverage, you could always try monitor (a quick search here will find it). I also use zanzito on my android phone to send back location details to track where I am (for use in proximity and zones) .

Thank you Keith, I don’t always have BT on on my phone so I can’t rely only on that. It appears Zanzito has been abandoned and is not longer being developed. That seems to be par for course with Home Assistant android apps.

Does it matter if it works, I’ve never had a problem with zanzito, it just works very well for sending location data to HA. My S9 doesn’t seem to last any longer with BT turned off so now I always leave it on :slight_smile:

I use bluetooth and ping and find the combination to be accurate when home - but I always have bt and wifi on.

The only trouble I had was that they were not quick enough in detecting when someone arrives home, so my ‘front door opened and nobody home’ notification would go off.

I have recently tried usiing llama to send a gpsLogger like message http message to the gpsLogger component on HA whenever my phone connects to my home wifi. It seems to be working so far - fewer alerts that the front door has opened.

You could try using the gpslogger app just on your home network, if just want verification, but my experience with that was that it introduced more errors from gps inaccuracy to be useful.

You could use tasker on the phone to determine if you are near a particular cell tower and send a message via pushbullet or something to HA.

Thanks for the input. I have BT on most of the time but need to turn it off from time to time and since I don’t use it for anything else I forget to turn it back on. I worry about projects that have been abandoned because any update to my phone’s OS could cause it to stop working. I don’t really want to invest hours into a topic and have it wasted because my phone updated.

I like the idea of using tasker but didn’t know how to send a message back to HA and have it respond. I can’t seem to find any documentation on it.

Thank you again for the help.