Mobile app for webCoRE

[lflorack]

multiple location geofences with events departed/arrived location (i.e. arrived home, departed work, etc.)
close-to-real-time location and ability to calculate distance from geofences (i.e how many miles away from home - as-the-crow-flies)
ability to create multiple events as a user “approaches” a location - i.e. turn the A/C lower when I’m coming home and I’m so many miles away.

The planned addition of geofence capabilities is something I’ve dreamed of having for a while - and honestly thought it should be part of SmartThings in the first place. But here @ady624 comes to add it!

My use case: I have Away versus Home modes to run my HVAC settings, etc. However, I run them via virtual switches or voice commands because the current single geofence - which I use for arrival lights, maybe eventually security, etc is too close to home to be fully useful due to the heat or A/C recovery time. (i.e., it’d still be to cold or too warm at arrival). Being able to keep the existing geofence and add other(s) would be perfect for me.

Thank you for working on this!

[jrfarrar]

AWESOME! Have been using life360 because of poor performance with ST app. Sounds like this might be the solution to all of my arrival sensor issues!

[Kebel871]

@ady624 oh, I forgot!! Where do I apply for alpha/beta testing

[acd37]

Awesome news! @ady624

My only request, in addition to what has already been suggested and what you’re already planning, is just a really nice, smooth, contemporary UX… I just like things to look pretty

[ady624]

It will start off by simply being a web wrapper for dashboard.webcore.co and most importantly visors (providing some control abilities) - but that’s all HTML that can be done in a web page. Plus the underlying logic for geofencing and GPS updates.

[ady624]

Made progress tonight to where the iOS app displays the dashboard and has bidirectional communication with it - it can register for locations in the background and gets notified when entering or exiting the location. It also sends a notification to the webCoRE smart app - which means all I have to do now is really build the UI for declaring these locations.

iOS allows up to 20 such circular regions and I am using 2 per location. Two centered circles, one smaller and one larger, you need to enter the smaller one to arrive and exit the larger one to exit - this should cut off on a lot of false positives. So in all, I will provide up to 10 locations and an emhanced virtual presence device. One of the 10 locations will be primary, driving the “presence” attribute. Another will be “closestLocation” and provide the name of the location closest to the user, say home or work. Another one will be “activeLocation” which will be the location at which the user currently is, or empty if the user is at none. Makes sense? This way you can say:

If user’s activeLocation changes to “work” <<< this means you arrived at work

[c1arkbar]

This is awesome!! I can’t wait for this to launch!

[Barney]

This is gonna be awe.some.

[ady624]

This is on a real phone

Time to test with the app closed

[Nezmo]

Yet ST can’t get presence to work reliably, or add more-than-basic functional DTHs, keep rendering consistent across OSs … the list goes on.

One has to ask, how come Ady can churn out all this functionality at the rate he does … and it works.

I get it, ST have infrastructure and politics to deal with but good grief. Talk about an opportunity missed.

[ady624]

Who wants altitude too?! For high rises?

[Cozdabuch]

I’ll take altitude, can always use it at work

[jrfarrar]

Time to test with the app closed

Hopefully this doesn’t stall the awesomness! From what I remember between Android/iOS different apps had different issues. The ST app was the worst at being closed and still reporting. Life360 seems to do a good job. BUT I’m sure as with those apps they will need to be set manually to NOT shutdown. Battery optimization = “Not Optimized” for Android and I forget what’s it’s called in iOS.

Even the thought of something working as described above is simply awesome!

[jrfarrar]

complicated but working presence sensor

Thought there might be some good stuff in this to aid in the app creation.

[acd37]

Sounds delightful! Would love to get on as a beta tester like whoever else suggested it above ^^

What do you think your rollout timeline is?

[mdisieno]

This would be awesome! This might honestly fix all my presence issues and bolster my automation needs. However I can help let me know!

[ady624]

So, ran into a bit of design issue. Here are the facts that I need to deal with:

1. a user can have multiple instances installed into a location
2. a user can have multiple locations (multiple hubs)
3. a user can define multiple - let’s call them - places
4. a user can have multiple phones

The main issue is the synchronization of all these things. I will need to complete the signup and login process because I need to store the linking information between all of the above. In the process I am considering this:

1. register a browser, then while in the dashboard, you get the option to login or register. At this point, one can register multiple times (for various, shady reasons?) - can multiple user accounts share an instance? Should they?
2. Should all other instances belonging to the same account as the registered instance automatically be populated once a user is created?
3. Should places be common to the whole account, the whole location, or independent from instance to instance? I’d make them account-global, so that creating a place automatically spreads that place to all presence devices managed by webCoRE for that account (so all locations, all instances)
4. another problem is handling devices - only one instance in a location should handle devices, two instances would fight over creating devices with the same name. This is one of the biggest issues I have - an instance has to take ownership of the device and it is also responsible for managing presence and all updates to said devices.

Any ideas?

[Robin]

can multiple user accounts share an instance? Should they?

I think that’s an unnecessary complication… there should be one admin user for the dashboard, that admin can assign guest users for visors and the app.

[Robin]

Should all other instances belonging to the same account as the registered instance automatically be populated once a user is created?

Yes

[ady624]

I don’t think there will be “guest users” - I’d rather make the visors work with invitation codes - that can expire too and provide a) view access b) control access c) control access with a password, etc. So you’ll be able to create n visors and m codes - then a matrix between the two determines what each code can see/control