Tracking locations with Life360

Posted on
Wed Jan 28, 2015 11:39 am
Chameleon offline
Posts: 611
Joined: Oct 04, 2014

Tracking locations with Life360

I've been looking for a way to track family members to see if they're at home or on their way home. The problem was the they had a whole range of different phones & operating systems. Finally I found a solution in Life360. The app is free and allows you to create circles that contain geofences for specific places (e.g. Home or Work). It works on all operating systems and all phones.

When a member of the circle enters the place you've specified it will send an email to an address that you specify. Because the email subject is always relevant to where and what the member is doing (arriving or leaving), I can then track the emails using either triggers or python to update my system accordingly. It also links directly to my Nest Thermostat and updates the Home/Away automatically depending on whose home.

If you're looking for a simple, non-coding solution, it's worth a look. http://www.life360.com or look for the app on the Apple Store

Mike :)

Posted on
Wed Jan 28, 2015 3:06 pm
kw123 offline
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Joined: May 12, 2013
Location: Dallas, TX

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

how do you get emails, do you have to buy the professional version?

Posted on
Wed Jan 28, 2015 6:12 pm
jay (support) offline
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Re: Tracking locations with Life360

Nice pointer, thanks!

Jay (Indigo Support)
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Posted on
Thu Jan 29, 2015 7:37 am
Chameleon offline
Posts: 611
Joined: Oct 04, 2014

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

No you don't have to purchase the premium package although the free version only allows you to have two places specified. If you need more than that you'll have to upgrade your circle to premium which costs $5.00/month.

This is how I set it up. Hopefully I can explain it :-)

When you register an account with Life360 you provide it with an email address for the account. I chose my indigo gmail account xxxxx.indigo@gmail. I use this account for email triggering anyway so it was already set up. Once you've created a circle (I've got one called Hesketh Family) you can then create places. I created one called Home unsurprisingly. Once that's done anyone you've invited as a member entering or leaving the circle will trigger an email to your registered account. However there is one exception - it won't tell you when you enter or leave the site. I guess they assume that you already know where you are :roll: I struggled a bit with this and then I realised I could get emails about my movements as well. I created another user for my wife namexxxx.indigo@gmail.com
and created a life360 account for her using this new gmail account. I also set up gmail so that any emails sent to the namexxxx.indigo@gmail.com were automatically forwarded to my xxxxx.indigo@gmail.com account.

Ok - so if you've got that far you're ready to set up Life360.

1. First of all I invited all of the family to get a life360 account and download the app to their phones - there's an option on the website to send invites. The only difference was that my wife's account was set up using the special gmail account everyone else just used their normal account

2. I created a circle called Hesketh Family and added a new place called "Home"

3. When everyone had set up their accounts I then went to places and looked for the "Alert" symbol (it's a bell). Clicking on this allowed me to specify who and when I should get trigger emails for. Note that I was missing from the list.

4. I then logged into my wife's account and selected the Hesketh Family circle that I'd invited her to. I clicked on places and selected the "Home" location alerts and was able to select me. I also selected the kids in my case because she likes to keep an eye on where they are :-)

That's it. As people move in and out of the circle an email is sent to my account (because I own the circle) at xxxxx.indigo@gmail.com. If I move then an email is sent to my wife's account which is automatically sent to my indigo account. All of the emails have the subject [b<name of person> has left (or arrived) at Home][/b]. Using the indigo email triggers I update a number of location variables for the family and can get my home automation to act accordingly.

As for my Nest - Life360 is part of the "Works with Nest" partners so all I had to do was follow the instructions on the Life360 FAQs to set it up. It works perfectly and automatically goes to "Away" the moment we leave the house until one of the circle members enters the Home place.

Hope that helps… let me know if I need to explain it better :)

Mike

Posted on
Sun Feb 01, 2015 4:22 pm
petematheson offline
Posts: 847
Joined: Sep 14, 2014
Location: Southampton, UK

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

This looks cool. I'm just about to install my Nest.
I currently achieve the same location based things via IFTTT that triggers off an email. Doesn't look like IFTTT can trigger a home / away on the nest so I might look at Life360 or possibly the Indigo nest plugin?

Cheers for the info!

Posted on
Thu Feb 05, 2015 3:25 pm
petematheson offline
Posts: 847
Joined: Sep 14, 2014
Location: Southampton, UK

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

OK, So I now have a nest!
I can't quite figure this out - but does Life360 set Home / Away on the nest as part of the 'Works with nest' ?

If not, then I may as well just continue with IFTTT and use my existing location based emails through that to trigger Indigo setting Home / Away.

Posted on
Thu Feb 12, 2015 1:33 am
philipbasile offline
Posts: 113
Joined: Jan 08, 2015
Location: NJ

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

I've been using skylark to track home/away for nest.

It's a dedicated nest add on but it works great I've been using it for months. It's in the App Store and has a one time cost, I don't remember how much but it was minimal. It lets you setup a geofence for multiple family members and sets away when your all out of the fence.

The developer seems to be adding features on a regular basis.

Posted on
Sun Feb 15, 2015 8:48 am
Chameleon offline
Posts: 611
Joined: Oct 04, 2014

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

You're right. Life360 acts as part of works with Nest. Once it was assigned to the Nest Controller it was all automatic after that. It's a neat solution and I can testify that it works :-)

Posted on
Thu Oct 14, 2021 4:08 pm
ryanbuckner offline
Posts: 1074
Joined: Oct 08, 2011
Location: Northern Virginia

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

Chameleon wrote:
I've been looking for a way to track family members to see if they're at home or on their way home. The problem was the they had a whole range of different phones & operating systems. Finally I found a solution in Life360. The app is free and allows you to create circles that contain geofences for specific places (e.g. Home or Work). It works on all operating systems and all phones.

When a member of the circle enters the place you've specified it will send an email to an address that you specify. Because the email subject is always relevant to where and what the member is doing (arriving or leaving), I can then track the emails using either triggers or python to update my system accordingly. It also links directly to my Nest Thermostat and updates the Home/Away automatically depending on whose home.

If you're looking for a simple, non-coding solution, it's worth a look. http://www.life360.com or look for the app on the Apple Store

Mike :)


I've created a plugin https://www.indigodomo.com/pluginstore/256/that you can try for Life360

Posted on
Wed Feb 02, 2022 10:16 am
Guest offline

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

Great! Thanks for the link!




Regards, Harri, soft
you can look here

Posted on
Wed Feb 02, 2022 10:08 pm
ryanbuckner offline
Posts: 1074
Joined: Oct 08, 2011
Location: Northern Virginia

Re: Tracking locations with Life360

if you decide to give it a try, please provide feedback. There are only a few users so far so testing has been limited.

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