🌐 Zone Notification Extended

panhans · November 21, 2023, 9:29pm

Just check out ne version. Whitespaces will be ignored now.

sitanshshah · November 21, 2023, 9:31pm

Nice one - thanks
I’ve also removed spaces anyway

Thanks again

panhans · November 21, 2023, 9:36pm

Ok, so the automation is triggered correctly but seems the notification got queued and send not immediately, is that correct? You’re on iOS, right?

//EDIT: Seem iOS need a special treatment. I will provide you a test version tomorrow. Maybe setting this critical option solves your problem.

DE5013 · November 21, 2023, 9:52pm

So, the symptoms are:

When I reach the zone (subdivision) boundary when leaving home, the automation seems to correctly detect that, at the appropriate place where my zone boundary ends, and immediately issues a notification. However, it issues a notification that I’m arriving. I believe this is incorrect, as the transition is from ‘home’ to ‘away’ (or inside the zone to outside). This is the undesirable outcome.
When I return into the zone, it correctly identifies that I’ve arrived back and immediately issues a correct notification. This is the desired outcome.

This zone boundary is 390 meters away from the house, so well outside of my local WiFi coverage.

You’re correct that I am on IOS (iPhone 14 Pro running latest version of IOS), with good 5G coverage. (Although, I’ve noticed there hasn’t been an update to the companion app since I installed it earlier this year.)

DE5013 · November 21, 2023, 9:58pm

OK, thanks.

BTW, Critical notifications are enabled for HA on my phone.

Tomorrow, I need to be somewhere that I have access to a web browser, so maybe I can get a decent JSON trace while away from the house - that might help to see what happened when I left the zone.

panhans · November 21, 2023, 10:09pm

Didn’t get it. This is the history of the person state:

And here the timestamps of the triggered automation:

You only enabled arriving notifications. So you will get two notifications at 7:57 and 9:41

So now have a look at your screenshot:

Its 9:44. First notification 1 hour ago. That’s 8:44. Nothing changed that time. Latest notification 2min ago. 9:42. That fits somehow.

So it seems the first notification comes way too late since the automation got triggered at the right moment. Could you have a look into your companion app. On Android I got a notification history in companion settings. Could you check timestamps there?

However I’ve added the critical notification setting to the blueprint. Maybe you check it out and test it again.

DE5013 · November 21, 2023, 10:56pm

OK, maybe I’m being a little dumb here and not fully understanding what I should be seeing.

I’ve only done one trip today, which lasted ~ 1 hour or so. Before I started off, I cleared all the previous notifications from my phone so there were no old notifications hanging around. To my thinking, I should have only got one notification - when I arrived back home.

When I drove out of the gate from the subdivision, the phone pinged with a notification that I was arriving back (wrong), and that was around 8:00 am - I didn’t check the exact time, but around 8-ish would be in the right ballpark. So this first notification was in error. It wasn’t delayed, as it happened just as I transited the zone boundary. (Plus, I’m curious as to why was it triggered twice 2 minutes apart at 7:57 am and 7:59 am? I wonder if somehow it thought I’d dropped out of the zone after 7:57 am and reentered before 7:59 am, that would sort of explain it, but that should not have happened.)

When I got back an hour or so later (9:41 seems about right, as I’d texted my wife at 9:34 saying I was heading back), I received the second notification as soon as I entered the subdivision (correct). Again, no discernible delay.

What am I missing?

DE5013 · November 21, 2023, 11:19pm

Ya know, I’m thinking maybe I should enable leaving and arriving notifications to see if it reports me leaving and then arriving back in the correct order (with correct timestamps)?

DE5013 · November 22, 2023, 9:14pm

OK, it looks like it may be a phone issue. I enabled both departures and arrivals this morning, and got both as I was leaving the subdivision, 1 minute apart.

So, I’m suspecting my phone is either losing the plot on the way out of the subdivision, or it’s somehow grabbing my WiFi network again. Either way, I’ll try reducing the radius of the zone and see if that fixes the issue.

panhans · November 23, 2023, 6:48am

You can also try the default Zone Notification blueprint that ships with home assistant per default. Would be interesting if you experience with that the same issue.

If yes there is something wrong with your phone / app settings or your connection. Maybe you could play with the polling interval or other settings in companion app related to location service. Don’t know how it looks on iOS, but on android I have to change some settings for certain devices, e.g. pixel 4a. With my pixel 7 for example location updates work out of the box.

DE5013 · November 23, 2023, 8:45pm

OK, I’ll try the default Zone Notification to see if the symptoms change. However, this standard blueprint has very limited options for actions, which really doesn’t suit my needs.

Using your extended version, I just walked out of my subdivision and I got an erroneous ‘Arrival’ message before I was half-way out of the zone. I then got a correct departure message when I was well outside the zone. I also go a correct arrival message when I walked back into the zone, albeit this was delayed fractionally. (BTW, I tried to download a Trace from my phone when I got the first erroneous Arrival message, but I have absolutely no idea where it is stored on the iPhone or how to retrieve it. Any ideas?)

Sadly, the IOS companion app doesn’t offer any form of tuning parameters, nor does IOS itself - it’s pretty much locked down - and annoyingly, there’s no logging facility

DE5013 · November 27, 2023, 10:50pm

OK, I think I’ve solved the mystery. It’s not a phone issue, but the way zones work in HA (and the way the blueprints handle them).

I have two overlapping zones: Home and Subdivision, both centered on my house. When I’m home, I’m clearly in both, but HA only allows a device tracker to be in one zone at a time, so it picks ‘Home’. When I travel outside the subdivision, I cross the boundary between Home and Subdivision (still inside Subdivision) - that’s where the erroneous ‘arriving’ message comes from. As I continue out of the Subdivision zone, I get the ‘leaving’ message (as expected). When I arrive back in Subdivision, I get the ‘arrival’ message (as expected). When I get closer to the house and enter the Home zone, it doesn’t give me a ‘departure’ notification, but quietly moves me from the Subdivision zone to the Home zone.

The solution was to modify my Home zone (in configuration.yaml) to have a much larger radius that encompasses the whole subdivision, and get rid of the Subdivision zone altogether. I tested it and it works as expected. Of course, the down side is that it makes using the person entity’s location to determine whether they’re actually home or not problematic.

Noblewolf · December 12, 2023, 7:42pm

Feature idea: It would be great if I could type a zone name instead of choosing a zone entity via the entity picker.

Example: I could set a zone around all of the grocery stores that I go to and call it “Grocery Store”. Then I would type “Grocery Store” for the zone to match instead of choosing zone.grocery_store, zone.grocery_store_2, zone.grocery_store_3, etc.
Then I would use this blueprint to send me a notification with a link to my Home Assistant Shopping List.

Matching a zone name instead of choosing a zone entity would allow me to add more “Grocery Store” zones on my map without modifying this blueprint each time.

panhans · December 12, 2023, 7:48pm

So, you want to add some wildcard functionality. I think it’s a good addition to add two additional text fields (enter/leave) for that use case.

// Would you go with entity ids or with the friendly names?

Noblewolf · December 12, 2023, 9:01pm

I would use the Friendly Names. I think it would be simpler for a novice user as well.

panhans · December 12, 2023, 9:28pm

I just did a quick test. Works for me. If you want you can test it. When everything is fine I will merge it into the main branch.

github.com

panhans/HomeAssistant/blob/779b4ad2d5f6031571ef0627f616cfb9aeda43a7/blueprints/automation/panhans/zone_notification_extended_full_trace.yaml


blueprint:
  name: Zone Notification Extended
  description: >

    ## Features

    - notification / custom action triggered by persons entering / leaving zones

    - notifications can be modified in color, channel group, etc.

    - notification can be turned on / off easily

    - custom condition for blocking / allowing notifications

    ## Additional Information

    If you want to test this automation, you need to change the state of an observed person. you can do this, in the developer options. Simply filter for your person entity, click on it and change the state to a zone used by this automation.

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Hammsta · December 19, 2023, 7:18am

hey @panhans, great work.

I am wondering if you can help with something that may be simple. I want to configure the message in the notification to include waze travel time.

e.g Person has left work, will be home in XX minutes

thanks

panhans · December 19, 2023, 7:39am

I’d installed waze travel time integration on my test system. Thanks, I didn’t know it unit now.

Try this:

{{ person }} has left {{ zone }}, will be home in {{ state_attr('sensor.waze_travel_time','duration') | round() }} {{ state_attr('sensor.waze_travel_time','unit_of_measurement') }}.

jeshmont · December 30, 2023, 7:17pm

Hi I started using this but wondering if there is a way to only send a notification when my device stays in a location for a certain amount of time. As it stands now with my zones configured a lot of them are congested in the same area and every device is bombarded with notifications when I’m simply passing through to another destination.

Another question I had was is there a way to switch the notifications from critical to a normal push notification? as it is now you are unable to silence them which for me is fine but for my wife she finds this to be very annoying.

Thank you for the work you have done!!!

panhans · December 30, 2023, 7:29pm

Yes, there is a duration slider in blueprint settings. Maybe I have to change the selector.

You and your wife are on iOS, right? I will add a toggle for critical notifications. That was more an experiment because someone here in the community had problems with receiving notifications.