#How to get reliable automation from Zone triggers? 🤔

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

north ivy
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I built up an automation that, when a family members cell phone geolocation entered the "Home" zone, it would perform the following tasks:

  • Open the garage door
  • Unlock the garage house entrance
  • Disarm the alarm
  • Announce over the speakers "<person> has entered the home zone"
  • Send text message to other family members of arrival
    At first, this seemed to work really well and was very popular with my family as it eliminated the need to remember to do all those manual steps.

However, I then started having issues with false triggers. Some examples:

  • My cell phone had an update at 3am and rebooted. it reported "unavailable" then "in home zone" so at 3am it triggered the automation
  • My wife & daughter have iPhones that do not reliably report their geolocations
  • My wife uses iCloud VPN and (apparently) that causes the location to shift? so at random times she "enters" the home zone

So, I am hoping someone has an idea of a way I could try to "harden" this automation so that it is resistant to false triggers. Ideas welcome! 🙂

image.png
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Something I am playing with on my own cell is to use a combination trigger. On my cell I have it set to require the bluetooth be connected to my car in order to allow zone changes since I would only enter/exit a zone while driving.

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however, when I tried to implement it on my wife's iPhone, the Bluetooth connection is not exposed as an entity so I wasn't able to use that approach for her. 😦

north ivy
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SO I'm experimenting this morning and I noted I can get WiFi SSI from the iPhone 🤔 I wonder if I can set it to that the trigger for "enterd home zone" is only valid if the WiFi is NOT connected to our home wifi SSID 🤔

fair mantle
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For the trigger issues from unavailable you could use the a state trigger of the device_tracker and define from and to state.

trigger: state
entity_id:
  - device_tracker.mobile_app_entity
from: not_home
to: home