Foolproof Alarm System Piston with dual Presence Sensors on each person?

#1

I am looking for a piston that will be almost 100% foolproof - that means no or very rare false alarms. The GF acceptance factor is important.

My setup:

I have 2 xiaomi momentary buttons that I could use to activate/deactivate, Hue RGB bulbs that could blink, and Sonos speakers I could use as sirens. Additionally, I have motion, door, and window sensors in each room. We do have a dog that can only trip the living room and bedroom sensors. The kitchen and entryway motion sensors are out of sight

For each person presence in my place, I utilize two determining sensors - one from Life 360 that uses network location approximation and the other is a script on my router that determines presence if their phone is connected to the wifi via mac address.

I set up each person to have 2 presence detectors because life 360 sometimes doesnt update quick enough and the wifi presence sometimes drops for 5-10 minutes when the phone hasnt been used in awhile.

Im trying to come up with a piston that would/could utilize my setup with dual presence sensors on each person. Any ideas how to go about this?

Thank you!

#2

I was in this same situation.

I tried network presence but found like you that phones drop off when they are sleeping and also don’t even connect sometimes until after entering the house.

I used life360 and the smartapps integrated GPS locationa nd found there are times (on both of our phones) when it would not change presence when we arrived home. So the alarm was still enabled.

The only way I could get this to run reliably was to use all 3. Yes all 3. Life360, Smartapps and network presence.

I created a presence device for each person (this i consider the “master” device) and I have master piston that runs every 30 seconds or so that does this for each persons devices.

If most occuring value of life360,smartapps,network is present then sent to present.
else set to not present.

I found this to be very reliable and have been monitoring it closely. Having 2 out of 3 saying I’m away or present increases the reliability a lot. That way at least 1 can fail and I’m good. I’m also monitoring battery usage and so far I don’t see a big hit on either phone. I wish there was a better way but everything has failed to be reliable enough.

The other good thing is if I reboot the phone or the battery dies, it will continue to think its at the last location (ex home) so it won’t trigger anything else to happen accidentally.

Hopefully this helps give you some ideas.

#3

Do you mind sharing your piston for the main parent presence?

This is my current piston, but if Life 360 fails to update, then it wont change correctly. I added a delay for when a sensor goes not present for 2 minutes to lower any false negatives

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#4

Sorry. I didn’t get replies to my topics so didn’t see this message until now.

Basically my master piston does something like

Every 30 seconds

If person1’s life360, network or smartapps presence is present then
– mark person1 present
else
– mark person1 not present

And I repeat that for each person. Every now and then you run into one of them that won’t leave home and is stuck. But you can tweak it to work for you.

I posted example pistons in another post.