Hi guys, I just noticed something wrong with my presence detection setup.
Both my wife and me have iPhones that I use to track the presence with the Netgear component and the iCloud component.
I use two methods because the iPhones sometimes disconnect from the wifi, probably for battery reasons, so I wanted a backup method that filled the gap.
My wife was out of home and her status changed to “home” few times for several minutes, I looked at the map and her “icon” wasn’t on the map, so it meant HA thought she was home. If I looked at the GPS coordinates, they were correct (out of home).
It did everything by itself, it automatically recognized the same MAC address (I guess) and joined the two trackers so that I see a single “device” in the dashboard.
I haven’t configured anything else.
here’s a screenshot of how the “mixed” device looks like
That must be a new feature, in the past device configurations complained if I had 2 presence devices with the same mac. I would remove one of the 2 trackers and watch it’s behavior. Most likely, your netgear thinks you are home and it’s overriding the location of the icloud. When this happens again, look at the state of the device inside netgear and the gps location (which comes from the icloud).
Right now it’s getting the info from the router because I’m at home. From my understanding, Netgear takes precedence because it’s less battery intensive (actually, not battery intensive at all).
I guess you are right, but I wonder how can it gets the information wrong, since it just checks for the device to be connected to the NAT…
you may just want to use icloud with this option in your device tracker:
consider_home [uses platform setting] Seconds to wait till marking someone as not home after not being seen. Allows you to override the global consider_home setting from the platform configuration on a per device level.
@FezVrasta
Regarditg the “wife not home but presence show her home”
You would need to know her location from home at that time.
icloud may not have had precise gps at that moment and reported coordinate that was within your “home zone”.
I use to do it that way but now I separate them and put them into a group. I think it’s because there is a default number for this
consider_home
180 Seconds to wait till marking someone as not home after not being seen. This parameter is most useful for households with Apple iOS devices that go into sleep mode while still at home to conserve battery life. iPhones will occasionally drop off the network and then re-appear. consider_home helps prevent false alarms in presence detection when using IP scanners such as Nmap. consider_home accepts various time
representations, (E.g. the following all represents 3 minutes: 180, 0:03, 0:03:00)
I use the iOS app location and nmap on my home network combined together to work out home or not. Seems to work reasonably well, though I wish it would work out that we’d left a bit quicker. Seems to take 15mins or so.
Just a thought, your wife wasn’t accessing home assistant via the ios app at the time was she?
Seeing the phone request from outside the network in the Netgear modem shouldn’t change the tracker status but if it’s as buggy as you say…