Trackr intergration

Yeah.I’m also wondering if trackr devices could be used as a cheap way of determining what room you (your phone) is in. Having a trackr in each room and comparing signal strengths.

Have you heard about trackr atlas?

yes, I’ve been waiting on them to get released so I can buy a couple and test them out.

All,

I have setup the TrackR connection in my configuration.yaml and the data is pulling in to home assistant. But my TrackR devices always show away.

I saw that some users had to setup zones and expand the radius to get this working but even expanding my radius beyond 500 does not appear to get my devices to show home.

I can also see that the default state that home assistant has for the TrackR entities is not_home. Am I missing something about the away / home configuration?

Anyone have any thought on this issue?

Update:

Additional troubleshooting showed that the latitude and longitude numbers that I had used to define my Home zone were not correct.

I noticed that when I clicked on the map option after setting up my home zone it was not in the correct location. Once I changed lat/long settings to the correct numbers and setup “Proximity” component for my device, the home / away function started to work correctly.

That’s good. Mine were never responsive enough for me. I think because we are all on iPhones here, the phones just didn’t update with the tracker information often enough. I had to switch to owntracks, which isn’t the optimal solution, but it’s only marginally worse than the trackr solution would have been if it had been responsive enough. And since owntrack seems to work fine, the additional setup and limited tracking abilities will have to be good enough for me until Apple comes out with a phone that doesn’t go to sleep whenever it wants. No wonder teenagers like their iPhones so much. They both sleep all the time.

For anyone interested, I am doing a reverse engineering task on the TrackR. You can read all about it on https://diystuff.nl/embedded/trackr-reverse-engineering/

Also I will try to find out which firmware is running and to see if I can also put new firmware in to give it alternative functionality. Like it would be fun if you could pair a couple of TrackR devices together and when you press the button on one of them, all TrackR devices are beeping. Maybe use a morse code to find a specific device.

When you have one connected to your keys and another one to your wallet, you cannot find your wallet with your keys, you first have to find your phone and then find your wallet . …

Hey everyone I have been reading this thread over and over and I see that most of it took place before full HA integration was possible.

I have not been able to find any further documentation or forums about getting Trackr working beyond this one and the component setup page in HA.

I have my 2 Trackrs showing up in known_devices.yaml and that part of the process works great even if I remove them both or change names in the Trackr app they will show up immediately in HA known_devices.yaml.

The issue I am having is that when I leave the house the Trackrs never change to away or show up at any of the zones I have created in the neighborhood my range is 100 meters the default.

I tried taking the dogs for a 5-mile walk and remoting into my house and checking HA and the status never changes.

Also I noticed when I click on the Trackr info it says last seen and last updated as very diffrrent time frames, I have even tried removing the Trackr from my phone and readded them it updates the last seen and last updated at the time of pairing but never updates again.

Am I missing something?

Update, I was able to get the Trackrs to work but what was causing the issue was 2 things.

  1. The Trackr app is supposed to report your location every 30 min but I have seen it be closer to 3-4 hours. This causes your location in HA to generally be off unless you are away for a long period of time. I reached out to trackr but they are useless.

  2. HA even once Trackr updates sometimes doesn’t update my location without a service restart.

To make this all happen immediately you can force close Trackr and open it again this will force your location update.

Just want to clarify some things.

last updated is the last time the trackr firmware was updated
last seen was the last reported location update time

I noticed some of the issues you are seeing. Sometimes when I am out walking the dog (not far less than a mile) I will get an alert that the dog is away but not often. I have an old android phone at my grandmothers running the trackr app and tasker. I have tasker reboot the phone every hour and that forces the location update and also keeps the phone on wifi (not sure why it drops off her wifi…) She watches the dog during the week.

Overall the trackr tracking is nice, but slow, and only nice when it works which isn’t even close to 80% of the time… not sure anything can be done about it since trackr’s mobile app is whats doing the work really.

One other thing, the battery level reporting also blows and isn’t every correct for me. I just replaced a battery last week that was reporting at like 54% because the trackr completely stopped working.

Thanks for the info.

I spoke to Trackr last week and they are updating the app or so they say to resolve an issue I showed them with the app not updating my location it takes around 4 hours instead of 30 min.

Update: Trackr updated the IOS app and fixed the large delay in location updates I am still testing whether this translates well into HA as sometime HA still doesnt see the updates until you restart HA.

If this happens again can you send me your logs? I still haven’t seen this issue.

@w1ll1am23 Apologies, this is an older project - but I was curious if you could share some details on how you built the TrackR library back end and if it’s possible to send instead of receive information. Ideally, I’d like to simulate the “Start Searching” function in order to trigger the alert sound. My end game is to build a lightweight android wear app that can trigger the noise, but I’m woefully inexperienced with jerry-rigging api calls.

That “call” is made to an already paired device. The TrackR library I created is used to access the online API and doesn’t have any direct access to the TrackR devices. I would assume that the Bluetooth connection is encrypted? So I am not sure how you would go about sniffing the traffic sent by the app to the Bluetooth device. I unfortunately don’t have any experience with that. I would think the best bet would be to decomplie the TrackR APK and see if you have any luck seeing what they are doing there.