Im looking at setting up Presence Detection for welcome home messages but everything I have read up on requires apps and settings to be defined on every persons phones.
Are there any systems that dont require fiddling with everyones phones? Getting a tracking app installed on my teenagers phones will be impossible! Just a simple ping and define the IP?
Thanks
There are currently 64 types of presence detection to choose from, including simple ping, router based, etc. However, in my experience, that type doesn’t work nearly as well as the ones that use apps installed on the phones. Check out Presence Detection components.
Seeking the same thing, I found it works well to use HA’s ‘tomato’ device_tracker platform.
(which is just one of many tracker platforms, Tomato happens to be my WiFi AP’s OS)
It notices if the mobile device is present based on a poll of the WiFi AP’s current active device list.
There is of course the predictable polling lag, plus the aging time before the device is no longer listed by the AP once it leaves the area, so this method’s is not what anyone would call ‘instantaneous’.
But I only use it to control a daily automation that fires only if someone is home.
I also use my router to detect presence. You need to figure out the MAC address of the devices, but once it’s done it seems to work fine for me.
I am using Unifi .
Thank you for the reference, will go through them…
Gave NMAP a go to start with, nice and easy to setup and works ok but the lag is a problem so will continue researching.
I dont have bluetooth so thats not an option for me.
I think the biggest problem you’ll find is that cell phones tend to stop responding to pings and such in order to save battery. That’s what generally makes them somewhat unreliable. But some seem to have better luck than others, so yes, you just need to try several and find the one or ones that work best, and if you find you need more than one per person, then you can use the person component to combine them. Or there are other ways that people have found useful to them.
Keep in mind that just because a device registers you as home it doesn’t mean you are in the house.
Our phones register us as home a house or two away. Our WiFi registers our housekeeper as at our house when she’s parked out front in her car. Both methods can register our presence if we (or our housekeeper) just drive by our house.
I’ve found that combining Bluetooth (through monitor) and WiFi (using the nmap tracker because of issues with my router), gives me a fantastic home/away detection ability.
If you’ve got a front door sensor you can use automations to improve the logic, such that it requires the door to recently have been opened before somebody can be marked as home or away. I found doing that has removed the false positive aways (I’m less worried about false positive home detections).
I know you said no apps, but if you do the above (Bluetooth via Monitor + Wifi via Nmap (or your routers component if supported directly) It could also be worth adding Google Maps location sharing.
If everyone uses android then google maps is installed and collecting the data anyway so you may as well get some benefit from it.
If it makes your teenager feel better you can set up a simple on off sensor that changes based on if they are home or away - and use that on your front end (so that you cant easily get access to granular location data just a simple home/not home).
As an added benefit you can also tell if the phone is charging (which I use to trigger our ‘everyone has gone to bed’ scene)
With the above NMAP and Google location I get far less false positive/negatives (1 a month, max) although it still takes around 20seconds to mark me as home. I plan on setting up monitor to make it all but instant.