Tracking altitude

Configuration
1

Hi,
I have the following use case: a member of the family spends much of his/her time in another separated unit in the same building, different floor, let’s say first and fifth floors.
At the moment, the device tracking will report her/him ‘home’, but actually she/he is, let’s say, 10 meters above or below the automated unit of the house, so all the automations have a misrepresented situation.
Does anyone else have a similar case? Did you find any solution?

Thanks,
gl

2

did you try FIND app for android… it works quite well for indoor tracking.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hcp.find&hl=en
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.seversion.roomplus&hl=en

3

Thanks, would you advise to install one’s own server or use the public one?

4

that app works through wifi signal near us, not GPS. I’m using the public server. if you manage to setup private server i would like to know how u did it. :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

Another option would be using beacons. For instance with OwnTracks.

But FIND looks pretty sweet, I might give it a try before getting beacons and/or Pi Zero W’s for each room.

6

Ok, actually it wasn’t easy to setup a private find server.

I followed the instructions here, but there are a few problems (I’m on ubuntu 16.04).

  • installing go was easy, but then the find package has to be extracted under the go->src directory (in my case /home/myusername/go/src otherwise it won’t build.
  • I was trying to connect find to my existing MQTT server but it doesn’t support authenticated connections to existing server (only anonymous), so I had to change the source a little bit and recompile it.
  • so far, so good: it looks like it’s working, I still have to try HA integration, do you have any hint?
7

I don’t know how to set it up in HA using the private server. but this is how my setup in public server.

sensor:

  - platform: rest
    resource: http://ml.internalpositioning.com/location?group=YOUR_GROUP_NAME&user=USER
    value_template: '{{ value_json.users.USER[0].location }}'
    method: GET
    name: FIND location
    scan_interval: 1
8

I had the same problem regarding mqtt. Can you provide the required changes or send a pullrequest to add this functionality?

Testing this without mqtt showed it worked pretty well. But it sometimes shows the wrong room (e.g. livingroom instead of bedroom upstairs)

9

I changed line 33 of mqtt.go to
opts.AddBroker(server).SetClientID(RandStringBytesMaskImprSrc(5)).SetCleanSession(true).SetUsername(RuntimeArgs.MqttAdmin).SetPassword(RuntimeArgs.MqttAdminPassword)

then you can launch find with --mqttadmin and --mqttadminpass, but this is just a temporary workaround: there should be different parameter name with due checks. Once I find the time to get to know better the project, I might send a PR. Feel free to do it yourself, I already opened an issue :wink:

10

Hi, I added support for FIND in Zanzito, in case you’re interested, please see here.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.barbaro.zanzito

11

possible to start tracking in background? without opening FIND and clicking Track?

12

Hi, yes you can do both tracking and learning in background, no need to use the FIND app.
Zanzito communicates through MQTT, so you have to use your own private FIND server (although you could use the FIND MQTT public server, but it wouldn’t be advisable for privacy reasons).

13

If you have tasker you may be able to guess the location better using the wifi status and the strength of signal.Then you can make an MQTT post to update the status based on that, I use the MQTT Publisher Plugin and it works fine.

I found a post on reddit on how to check the signal strength, but you could probably split the tasker variable wifi info %WIFII and grab the strength from there.

14

I was using Find with HTTP sensor in HA… can you add support to send find the location through HTTP? I’m using cloudmqtt in HA which is limited 10 connection.

15

Hi,

I suppose I could, I added it to the list :wink:

By the way, I don’t FIND it that much reliable: it’s great for my use case (two different and far floors), but contiguous rooms are easily confused. What is your experience? Any hint?

gl

16

ya, some times I does that. i use it to detect me when i reach to my room from work so it can welcome me.sometime owntracks can take some time to change state to home…using this i can force device tracker.

17

I have been using FIND for few months now, found to be mostly reliable so far as to use for automations. There is no other DIY solution out there that can detect the phone at a room level with any accuracy. There is HappyBubbles which requires a beacon to track and the android phone can’t act as a beacon natively.(Hence the feature request). I have tried both the technology and fond the Happy bubbles to be more reliable. It is unusable because I can’t make everyone carry a beacon around.
For find to be any useful, the app needs to broadcast every second or so, which drains the battery. Can you please make an option to report to FIND only when connected home WIFI.

18

Interesting, thanks!

added to the list :wink:

19

How have you set this up in HASS? Do you use mqtt room presence? Are you using zones with mqtt device tracker?