Presence tom-foolery

#21

I have also been using


For presense detection. It has been rock solid for months. Smartthings actually has been pretty good as well. I actually have two presense sensors for myself the Wi-Fi and the Smartthings. I have a couple pistons that only run based on wifi. Like unlocking my door when I get home. That way I have to be right at the house, vs 500 ft away for the door to unlock.

Here was the final script that I came up with based on several of the comments in the thread for my router.

#22

I have an Ubiquity setup in my house consisting of a USG Pro 4, Unifi 16-150w, 4 UAP AC Pro and a AP Mesh Pro. I have a ruby script running on a local server that uses the Unifi API to poll my network for mac addresses. This was actually quite a pain because devices don’t always tell the network they left and such, but after a lot of tinkering I managed to get something working.

I’ve linked a gist here with my script, but I’d highly recommend you use it for inspiration since I wrote it with my custom needs in mind. It uses a YAML file to load the MAC addresses and users and I use the ASUSWRT Wifi Presence Smart App / Device to make it all work.

The YAML format is like this

johndoe:
  mac: xx:00:xx:00:xx:00
  app_id: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  access_token: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
#23

Spent quite some time trying to make this work, three reasons, firstly my ST presence sensor gave up on me, secondly I found the ST app mobile presence functionality unreliable, and finally I wanted to detect presence of other family members without them having to have the ST mobile app installed, and access to mess up my settings etc.

So after some trial and error with a few options i have ended up as follows

An Automate flow - http://llamalab.com/automate/ - (i created the flow) running on everyone’s android devices (no IOS) which based on a change in Wi-FI and a short delay will detect the current location and if inside/outside the defined area will call a webcore piston via the execute endpoint which then sets a custom presence device handler (Virtual Presence Plus by Austin Pritchett with a few updates). Each family member has their own presence device created in ST. For a more accurate arrival I have set the Automate flow to bypass the location detection if connected to the home Wi-Fi.
I’ve been running this for a few weeks, and it seems reliable. The implementation isnt entirely straight forward, but doesnt involve a huge amount of development.

Drawbacks here would be if a phone was left at home, or was switched off (my kids never switch their phone off/leave it behind!) when leaving/arriving, but would be corrected when the phone was powered again. And if all else fails the presence of the individuals can be overridden through the ST app presence device which i have complete control over.