Help with Presence


#1

1) Give a description of the problem
I’m very new to WebCoRE and am trying to use presence sensors to control lighting, etc. I think I have them setup correctly on both my wife’s iphone and my phone — at least both show up in the list of physical devices (both also show up in the Smartthings web under “My Devices” as “mobile presence”). But when I try to use them in an IF statement, the only options in the dropdown box on the far right of the “Physical Device” line are presence, $status and $occupancy.

2) What is the expected behavior?
Some of the example pistons that I’ve look at online have options like “arrivingatplace,” “leavingplace” and “currentplace.”

3) What is happening/not happening?
None of the options just listed are showing up.

4) Post a Green Snapshot of the pistonimage

5) Attach any logs (From ST IDE and by turning logging level to Full)

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#2

I don’t know what example pistons you’ve been looking at, but those sound more like variables that have been set, possibly based on input from other devices.

Looking at mine, I see physical device, name of physical device, and 3 items in the dropdown: presence, $status, and $occupancy. The presence is easy to miss, so double-check that you have it. If not, double-check the device type in the smartthings API (https://graph.api.smartthings.com) is set as mobile presence.

Once you’re able to select presence, you should be able to add a comparison such as IS or IS NOT and compare to PRESENT or NOT PRESENT.


#3

Nit picking here :). You should point users to https://account.smartthings.com and not the graph.api url.


#4

Thanks for responding. Although I’m new to WebCoRE, I can follow most of what you say:

— Both phones are listed as “mobile presence” on Smartthings API with a status of “active.”

— The dropdown list has the three things you mentioned (presence, $status, and $occupancy), and I can use the PRESENT or NOT PRESENT selections in pistons. I assume they’re working, but I haven’t been able to test them yet.

It seems to me that this would only work with the default “place.” I have defined another place (“Work”) that I would also like to detect. In the examples I’ve seen, it should be possible to have lines that say something like “Amanda’s phone presence changed to ‘Work’” or “Amanda’s phone arrivingAtPlace changes to ‘School’” In these examples, I am assuming that “Work” and “School” are places, but I can’t find a way to add them into the code.


#5

I’m not an expert on this, however, do you need to use an app like life360 on the phones to identify places? I wasn’t aware you could identify locations using the ST app presence feature.

life360 (with subscription) lets you add different locations, which it can then report back to ST/webcore


#6

Did you install the webcore app on your phones? I think that has to be done so you can use the webcore presence sensor instead of the SmartThings one. I did this and have variables such as arrivingAt, leaving, currentPlace etc.


#7

Thanks for the suggestion. I did install webcore on my phone (android) but I haven’t put it on my wife’s (iphone) yet. However, I still don’t see the variables arrivingAt, leaving, etc.


#8

Did you set your places in settings of the webcore app?


#9

I did. They show up both in WebCoRE and Smartthings.