Hello Folks,
I have setup presence detection on unifi. It is however has atleast 1 min to 1.5 min delay before it detects my devices home. I want to use it to open my garage door when I arrive home. I was wondering if it is normal for UNIFI to behave this way. If that is the case how can I go about setting up presence detection through MQTT. Is there a way to access the devices on the mqtt serve through device tracker?
Hah. almost five y/o question…
@fxcoolby - I’m noticing the same thing and for exactly the same purpose.
Background:
When I connect to the network (via esp32 chip), the time it takes for the Unifi Network integration to detect it as “home” generally transitions in about 5-10 seconds. Sometimes it takes well over a minute and I’ve had it go undetected for many minutes and I give up.
I’m partially curious about what the mechanism is that the integration uses to determine if a device is home and if it’s something that’s tunable. i.e. polling interval ? My assumption is that it polls, but the inconsistency makes it somewhat unreliable for things like opening my garage door as I’m either approaching or leaving the house.
The transition from home → away seems like it’s related to expiration of the arp entry which is tunable on some of the Unifi devices (UDMSE - yes, USG-3P - not so much) so you can either accept the 5-10m lag or just use a timer to close the garage door.
In light of the unreliability of a quick transition from away → home, i am also starting to wonder if by sending an MQTT message to an HA message broker one might get a more consistently speedy response. Unsure what became of your endeavor since this seems to have gone unnoticed/unanswered.
So my questions are if
a) what is the Unifi Network mechanism for determining if devices are “home” and if it’s tunable?
b) Is sending a message to an MQTT broker a more reliable/speedy presence detection method?