Find my iDevices!

Posted on
Sat Nov 19, 2011 8:52 am
bluenoise offline
Posts: 143
Joined: Aug 23, 2008

Re: Find my iDevices!

bschollnick2 wrote:
bluenoise wrote:
I have found that polling location data every 15 minutes drastically reduces battery life on our iPhones, which is a bummer because I was using this to determine whether or not we are home. Is anyone else seeing a big hit to their battery life?


I don't see a dramatic reduction, but I certainly do see a reduction in battery life when Find My iPhone services are used often. Keep in mind, even if you are talking a single computer doing these requests, that's 48 times a day that FMID is requesting your phone's location...

Are you running iOS v5.01? I saw a good increase in battery life after installing (& Rebooting the iPhone).

- Ben

Two of the iPhones are running 5.01 (iPhone 4 model), while the third one is an iPhone 3G running the latest available for that model.

Posted on
Tue Nov 22, 2011 9:44 am
MrJeffreyGee offline
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Location: United States

Re: Find my iDevices!

Has anyone been noticing a delay in Indigo or Find My iDevice recognizing that you've left home? I've got my Indigo & Find My iDevice setup so that it automatically goes into a Home Security mode after I'm 0.45 miles away from home and it'll send me a push notification when Home Security activates, but this past weekend it didn't activate for 43 minutes till after I've left home. I've also got a driveway sensor buried under the ground in the driveway that reliably senses when we've arrived/left home and it triggers the Find My iDevice to do an update immediately, then again in 2 minutes, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes. After 10 minutes of leaving the house I noticed that it didn't activate, so I've also got a Action Group item that I created that forces a Find My iDevice update and I tried that as well, but it still didn't activate home security. I even tried logging into the Find My iPhone app thinking that maybe the location information was stale or cached on Apple's servers and I could do a forced refresh on them, but that didn't seem to help either.

As for when I came home it didn't register that I arrived for 5 to 8 minutes when it should be like 1 or 2 since the driveway sensor activates the Find My iDevice update immediately (and again at the 2, 5, & 10 minute mark).

I've also got 2 iDevices (iPad & iPhone 4) setup in my MobileMe/iCloud account, so the delay isn't due to too many devices to poll.

So if anyone's experience delays of Find My iDevices I'd like to hear about it and if you've got a solution even better.

Find My iDevice Version: 1.20
Indigo Version: 5.0.0 (Non-Beta)

Posted on
Tue Nov 22, 2011 10:29 am
five337 offline
Posts: 52
Joined: Jun 21, 2010

Re: Find my iDevices!

I do the same thing, but I have it poll 2 mins after my garage is closed. I also get a text "welcome home" or "alarm armed" so I know exactly when indigo thinks that I've left or arrived home.

I also poll every 15 mins.

95% of the time - it figures out I have left the house in the 2 minute window.

4% - it catches it on the next poll - about 17-20mins after I leave. I think this is because I happen to leave as a 15min poll is about to happen and the 2 min poll was too quick for apple to update. So I open garage door, 15min poll happens on schedule, apple caches it, close garage door, 2 mins expire, iDevices pulls the data and it still shows I am home. At least this is what I *THINK* is happening based on the logs.

1% - it takes 2 to 4 polls to figure out I've left. I think apple just isn't updating the location data and Ben's plugin is being fed the outdated data. When I check the logs it shows ben's plugin pulled the data at the correct time, but still had me at home.

I've been using the location data on the iPhones way before Ben made this great plugin and have always had little delays from apple's servers like I think we are experiencing.



MrJeffreyGee wrote:
Has anyone been noticing a delay in Indigo or Find My iDevice recognizing that you've left home? I've got my Indigo & Find My iDevice setup so that it automatically goes into a Home Security mode

Posted on
Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:40 am
bschollnick2 offline
Posts: 1355
Joined: Oct 17, 2004
Location: Rochester, Ny

Re: Find my iDevices!

five337 wrote:
95% of the time - it figures out I have left the house in the 2 minute window.

4% - it catches it on the next poll - about 17-20mins after I leave. I think this is because I happen to leave as a 15min poll is about to happen and the 2 min poll was too quick for apple to update. So I open garage door, 15min poll happens on schedule, apple caches it, close garage door, 2 mins expire, iDevices pulls the data and it still shows I am home. At least this is what I *THINK* is happening based on the logs.

1% - it takes 2 to 4 polls to figure out I've left. I think apple just isn't updating the location data and Ben's plugin is being fed the outdated data. When I check the logs it shows ben's plugin pulled the data at the correct time, but still had me at home.

I've been using the location data on the iPhones way before Ben made this great plugin and have always had little delays from apple's servers like I think we are experiencing.


Exactly. As far as I can tell, Apple to some extent, is caching the Find My iPhone / iPad / etc, data.

Since it is an undocumented API, I do not know of a official way to force the Poll to be uncached... But in most cases, the data is accurate...

------
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Posted on
Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:55 am
five337 offline
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Joined: Jun 21, 2010

Re: Find my iDevices!

I've been using this method for tracking my iPhones even since Apple introduced FindMyIphone and the sosumi library was created over 2 years ago..

I poll every 15mins ( I used to poll every 5 mins before Ben made the plugin and forced me to slow down :D ) and never experienced any noticeable battery usage on any of my devices.


bluenoise wrote:
I have found that polling location data every 15 minutes drastically reduces battery life on our iPhones, which is a bummer because I was using this to determine whether or not we are home. Is anyone else seeing a big hit to their battery life?

Posted on
Wed Nov 23, 2011 9:56 am
MrJeffreyGee offline
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Posts: 74
Joined: Apr 26, 2011
Location: United States

Re: Find my iDevices!

I poll every 15 minutes as well.

I remember seeing an earlier post in this thread about possibly switching/adding Google Latitude as an option. If the delay is an Apple caching issue then I add my vote in for "adding" Google Latitude in as an option (not replacing Find My iPhone). I've also got a Front Door Strike kit installed and for a while I had a bluetooth app that sensed my iPhone's bluetooth then it would automatically notified Indigo that I was home, so it unlocked the door for me and would enable home security when I left. It worked beautifully for a while till the bluetooth starts going haywire (usually at the 3 day mark), so I'm looking for a fast acting replacement system and if Google Latitude could speed it up then all the better.

Also if Find My iPhone is a cached system... what about Find My Friend? Would that work better since it seems like a live constant feed for an iPhone's location.

Posted on
Wed Nov 23, 2011 11:37 am
bschollnick2 offline
Posts: 1355
Joined: Oct 17, 2004
Location: Rochester, Ny

Re: Find my iDevices!

MrJeffreyGee wrote:
I poll every 15 minutes as well.
I remember seeing an earlier post in this thread about possibly switching/adding Google Latitude as an option. If the delay is an Apple caching issue then I add my vote in for "adding" Google Latitude in as an option (not replacing Find My iPhone). I've also got a Front Door Strike kit installed and for a while I had a bluetooth app that sensed my iPhone's bluetooth then it would automatically notified Indigo that I was home, so it unlocked the door for me and would enable home security when I left. It worked beautifully for a while till the bluetooth starts going haywire (usually at the 3 day mark), so I'm looking for a fast acting replacement system and if Google Latitude could speed it up then all the better.

Also if Find My iPhone is a cached system... what about Find My Friend? Would that work better since it seems like a live constant feed for an iPhone's location.


To my knowledge no one has yet reverse engineered the Find My Friend system... And yes, I have thought about adding Latitude.... So I'll keep that in mind...

------
My Plugins for Indigo (v4, v5, and v6) - http://bit.ly/U8XxPG

Security Script for v4 - http://bit.ly/QTgclf
for v5 - http://bit.ly/T6WBKu

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Posted on
Thu Nov 24, 2011 11:02 am
bluenoise offline
Posts: 143
Joined: Aug 23, 2008

Re: Find my iDevices!

I just noticed something strange. In my log, I noticed this from this morning:

Nov 24, 2011 8:33:29 AM
WebServer Displaying Find My iDevices Web Page


There is nothing in the log saying any clients have connected, except my iPhone last night when I went to bed, so I don't know who or what would have requested that page display. What would trigger this message?

Posted on
Thu Nov 24, 2011 2:22 pm
bschollnick2 offline
Posts: 1355
Joined: Oct 17, 2004
Location: Rochester, Ny

Re: Find my iDevices!

bluenoise wrote:
I just noticed something strange. In my log, I noticed this from this morning:

Nov 24, 2011 8:33:29 AM
WebServer Displaying Find My iDevices Web Page


There is nothing in the log saying any clients have connected, except my iPhone last night when I went to bed, so I don't know who or what would have requested that page display. What would trigger this message?


IWS served the web page out to someone or something.... Do you have Indigo setup to Allow Remote Access, and to Require Authentication?

There is no way, that I am aware of, for the Plugin to display the web page, without someone accessing the Indigo Web Server (IWS).

- Ben

------
My Plugins for Indigo (v4, v5, and v6) - http://bit.ly/U8XxPG

Security Script for v4 - http://bit.ly/QTgclf
for v5 - http://bit.ly/T6WBKu

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Posted on
Thu Nov 24, 2011 4:31 pm
bluenoise offline
Posts: 143
Joined: Aug 23, 2008

Re: Find my iDevices!

I can access my pages remotely and I do require authentication with a strong password, but there is nothing in the log saying I've connected. Strange.

Posted on
Thu Nov 24, 2011 6:25 pm
bschollnick2 offline
Posts: 1355
Joined: Oct 17, 2004
Location: Rochester, Ny

Re: Find my iDevices!

bluenoise wrote:
I can access my pages remotely and I do require authentication with a strong password, but there is nothing in the log saying I've connected. Strange.


As far as I can tell, it appears that that connection message only occurs if you are connecting with an Indigo client (eg. Indigo application, or Indigo Touch).

True web browsing, does not display a connected message. (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:8176)

- Ben

------
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Security Script for v4 - http://bit.ly/QTgclf
for v5 - http://bit.ly/T6WBKu

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Posted on
Fri Nov 25, 2011 6:26 pm
hamw offline
Posts: 1212
Joined: Mar 31, 2008

Can't seem to get both iPhones to appear on the map

I'm setting up FMID again. Have put in my MobileMe credentials in the initial config panel and set up my phone. FMID works fine in that regard. However, although I've set up a separate device for my wife's phone and placed her MobileMe Family pack sub account as her credentials she does not show up on the map and there is not an entry for her, only for me. The settings dialog for each phone shows a pull-down for the individual phones, so it seems the devices are set up properly.

The info boxes for the both devices report the exact same information for battery strength and all other parameters.

Both phones have location data turned on, have the latest Find My iPhone app, and both phones are located with MobileMe service under their respective username/passwords. I'm running 4.3.3 on the phones.

I've deleted and redone the devices, re-entered the data, etc. Trying to see if there was something with my account, I made her account the FMID config username/password and now it only reports her phone's location. Any ideas?

Posted on
Sat Nov 26, 2011 5:21 am
bschollnick2 offline
Posts: 1355
Joined: Oct 17, 2004
Location: Rochester, Ny

Re: Can't seem to get both iPhones to appear on the map

hamw wrote:
I'm setting up FMID again. Have put in my MobileMe credentials in the initial config panel and set up my phone. FMID works fine in that regard. However, although I've set up a separate device for my wife's phone and placed her MobileMe Family pack sub account as her credentials she does not show up on the map and there is not an entry for her, only for me. The settings dialog for each phone shows a pull-down for the individual phones, so it seems the devices are set up properly.

The info boxes for the both devices report the exact same information for battery strength and all other parameters.

Both phones have location data turned on, have the latest Find My iPhone app, and both phones are located with MobileMe service under their respective username/passwords. I'm running 4.3.3 on the phones.

I've deleted and redone the devices, re-entered the data, etc. Trying to see if there was something with my account, I made her account the FMID config username/password and now it only reports her phone's location. Any ideas?


Contact me directly at benjamin AT schollnick DOT net, and I'll send you a beta that may help resolve the issue.

------
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Posted on
Sun Nov 27, 2011 4:23 pm
hamw offline
Posts: 1212
Joined: Mar 31, 2008

Re: Find my iDevices!

The new beta seems to have done the trick. It locates both iphones separately now. Two things which may or may not be under your control are the battery charge and charging status. For instance, my phone is currently at 47% but FMID registers 0.056, which I guess is 5.6%? And it says it is charging, which it is definitely not. So is Apple posting bogus info? The phone hasn't been on the charger since 9:00 am. Anyone else find these variables are accurate?

Posted on
Sun Nov 27, 2011 6:59 pm
bschollnick2 offline
Posts: 1355
Joined: Oct 17, 2004
Location: Rochester, Ny

Re: Find my iDevices!

hamw wrote:
The new beta seems to have done the trick. It locates both iphones separately now. Two things which may or may not be under your control are the battery charge and charging status. For instance, my phone is currently at 47% but FMID registers 0.056, which I guess is 5.6%? And it says it is charging, which it is definitely not. So is Apple posting bogus info? The phone hasn't been on the charger since 9:00 am. Anyone else find these variables are accurate?


Those values are what is passed to fmid, from Apple's iCloud / MobileMe. Since this is information is reverse engineered, there is no information on how to decode those two values. I'm considering removing them, since it's effectively useless information.

Apple is not giving us bogus information, they just haven't told us how to use it...

- Benjamin

------
My Plugins for Indigo (v4, v5, and v6) - http://bit.ly/U8XxPG

Security Script for v4 - http://bit.ly/QTgclf
for v5 - http://bit.ly/T6WBKu

Support Forum(s) - http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/userforum/viewforum.php?f=33

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