Someone help me please! I'm losing my mind trying to get device tracking to work

Configuration
1

Nothing is working for me, and I am lost. I started with HA a week ago, so I’m having a hard time getting up to speed on this. Currently I am trying to use Owntracks and Bluetooth tracking. Owntracks seems to be setup correctly. I’ve managed to get the bluetooth tracking to add both of the devices in my household I am tracking to the known_devices.yaml

Questions:

  1. Bluetooth doesn’t seem to be working. It just has us both as home, and won’t change to away if I leave range, or even if I shut the bluetooth off on my phone. All I have in the configuration file is:

     device_tracker:
   - platform: owntracks
     max_gps_accuracy: 200
   - platform: bluetooth_tracker

My known_devices.yaml looks like this for the bluetooth entries:

iphone_6:
  hide_if_away: false
  icon:
  mac: BT_6C:72:E8:C3:76:EA
  name: One BT
  picture:
  track: true
  vendor: Apple, Inc.

whitneys_iphone:
  hide_if_away: false
  icon:
  mac: BT_B7:53:AC:08:FD:89
  name: Two BT
  picture:
  track: true
  vendor: Apple, Inc.

Am I missing something?

  1. For owntracks, it seems the app needs to be running at all times on the devices? If the app is closed down completely it won’t submit data? Does using ‘move mode’ use a lot more battery than ‘significant changes mode’?

  2. If I want to use nmap as well, what do I need to do? I’m seeing that i need to add the mac address for the devices to the known device yaml. Do I just add it to the owntracks known device? Like this:

     ted_ted:
   hide_if_away: false
   icon:
   mac: 6B:72:E7:C4:75:E9
   name: ted
   picture:
   track: true
   vendor:

Do I then add nmap as a platform for the device trackers in the configuration.yaml file? Like this:

  device_tracker:
          - platform: owntracks
            max_gps_accuracy: 200
          - platform: bluetooth_tracker
          - platform: nmap_tracker
            hosts: 192.168.1.0/24

And where do I find the IP address I use for ‘hosts’?

Sorry for all of the questions. I desperately want this to work, and have been pulling my hair out for the last 4 days trying to get it to. I would be eternally grateful to anyone who could help me figure it out.

2

I would recommend breaking this up and getting one working before worrying about another.

  1. Everything looks correct, but bluetooth tracking is spotty at best. Some people have great luck with it, while others don’t.

  2. All I can recommend is test it. Try it with significant changes for a week and then try it in move mode for a week and see if you notice a significant difference in battery usage. You will however get better tracking with move mode. Another option here you can try is Life360. I have used it and Owntracks and like Life360 better. There is also a new Owntracks HTTP that does not require the use of an MQTT broker if I understand it correctly. I have not tried this out myself.

  3. You should never have to manually add anything to known_devices.yaml. When you add the nmap tracker, it will auto-populate your known_devices.yaml with every device on your network. Then you go through and change track: true to track: false for any devices you do not want to track. As for hosts - this is the IP address of your router.

Hope this helps.

3

Thanks for replying. I’ve shut off bluetooth tracking. It seems really unreliable. I’ve now got ios, owntracks, and nmap tracking working. I think between the three, I should get reasonable presence detection!

Oh, btw, the hosts is the IP addresses for the device, not the router. If you put the routers IP in, it creates a device tracker for the router itself.

4

Do you use owntrack for an old iphone? I thought owntrack and ios do the same thing but ios better.

5

No, I just have both running right now to see how well each of them works.

6

Odd. I could have sworn I had mine setup with the host as my router. I’ll have to check that when I get home. My setup tracks every WiFi device on my network and uses a template to report Online / Offline instead of Home / Away.