Detect car presence

Hi all,

at my parents' house a Fibaro switch will be installed to control gate door; then they could open/close it via Indigo/Siri and so on; I would like to allow them to open it automatically using Bluetooth/RFID/NFC, any idea?
Is piBeacon the solution or are there something else?

Thanks
Marco

PiBeacon should work, but though I've tried it I'm not a fan of the beacons. I never found the reliability of the beacons themselves to be worth the fairly painful set up process. However, if you are willing to put in the time and perhaps use beacons with bigger batteries than the ones designed to attach to a key chain it should be a good solution.

I'm using an app called "Smart Remote" (http://thehomeremote.com) solely to do presence detection with indigo. When I cross the geofence it tells Indigo I (or my spouse) are home or away. I've been using it for the last couple of weeks and it's been 100% reliable so far. If they have smart phones (iOS, android or windows) and your indigo is accessible outside your network (port forwarding or the indigo reflector) then it's a fairly inexpensive way to handle it IF you can make the geofence small enough to not have the gate opening way too early and still trigger reliably.

***** added correction *****

The link above is wrong. It is for a different app. The one I'm using is here: http://homeremote.bouncingball.mobi.

I'm using an app called "Smart Remote" (http://thehomeremote.com) solely to do presence detection with indigo. When I cross the geofence it tells Indigo I (or my spouse) are home or away. I've been using it for the last couple of weeks and it's been 100% reliable so far. If they have smart phones (iOS, android or windows) and your indigo is accessible outside your network (port forwarding or the indigo reflector) then it's a fairly inexpensive way to handle it IF you can make the geofence small enough to not have the gate opening way too early and still trigger reliably.

How does that affect the battery life on the phones? I went with beacons (and replacing 2032s in the Xys and magic tiles about every 6 months) because every geofence technique I have tried drove my (admittedly 2 year old) IPhone 6 from recharging it twice a week to plugging it in every night.

I'm using an app called "Smart Remote" (http://thehomeremote.com) solely to do presence detection with indigo. When I cross the geofence it tells Indigo I (or my spouse) are home or away. I've been using it for the last couple of weeks and it's been 100% reliable so far. If they have smart phones (iOS, android or windows) and your indigo is accessible outside your network (port forwarding or the indigo reflector) then it's a fairly inexpensive way to handle it IF you can make the geofence small enough to not have the gate opening way too early and still trigger reliably.

How does that affect the battery life on the phones? I went with beacons (and replacing 2032s in the Xys and magic tiles about every 6 months) because every geofence technique I have tried drove my (admittedly 2 year old) IPhone 6 from recharging it twice a week to plugging it in every night.

I haven't noticed any ill effects but we usually charge our phones overnight. I'll try to pay attention over the next couple of days and see how it behaves and let you. Know.

there are iBeacons with 2 AAA batteries https://www.amazon.com/iBeacon-Bluetooth-Programmable-Beacon-AAA-Battery/dp/B019G0W160/ref=pd_sim_147_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B019G0W160&pd_rd_r=HAE4CS5HZ5CCVVTC6GD4&pd_rd_w=BkAka&pd_rd_wg=pA36Q&psc=1&refRID=HAE4CS5HZ5CCVVTC6GD4 and they claim to do >>2 years.
I am running them now for ~ 8 months in my cars and no degradation of the AAA voltage is observed. So far no false positives or negatives.

Karl

Good to know! Thanks for that info, Karl. Those look perfect for use in a car.

ac4lt,
Just how small have you been able to make your geofence? I've been using Home Remote and it has been incredibly stable, but I would like to get the geofence a little smaller. (like "pulling into the driveway" smaller) I may have to go the beacon route for that. I have some Rad beacons and a rPi still in the box, but haven't mustered up the courage to jump into Karl's piBeacon yet.

Jim

ac4lt,
Just how small have you been able to make your geofence? I've been using Home Remote and it has been incredibly stable, but I would like to get the geofence a little smaller. (like "pulling into the driveway" smaller) I may have to go the beacon route for that. I have some Rad beacons and a rPi still in the box, but haven't mustered up the courage to jump into Karl's piBeacon yet.

Jim

Jim,

I haven't got it especially tight. I think it's 100m for arrival and 140m for departure. For me that's still been faster to transition to the gone state than PiBeacon which would take a few minutes. and I'd be a mile away. This transitions to away while I'm still on my street. I haven't had any issues with false positives or negatives but it's only been a couple of weeks. I chose the slightly wider departure fence just to attempt to handle the edge case where the accuracy happened to be roughly the size of the fence. Whether that would have been a real issue or not, I'm not sure, but that was my reasoning behind it.

And for @johnpolasek who asked about battery life: the phone has been off charge since about 8am this morning and except for the 20 minute commute (x2) has been off charger. Now, 13 hours later the phone is at 93%. I really haven't used the phone at all except for waze and listening to podcasts in the car while on charger so it's been idle so far as user interaction goes except for just now when I was checking the geofence size.

With pibeacon you can set fast down to e.g. 20 secs then you up to down time is ~ 20 secs.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I posted the wrong link in my post above. The actual link for the app I'm using is http://homeremote.bouncingball.mobi. My apologies for any confusion I caused anyone. I'll edit the above post if the forum will let me to correct the link there.

I'll have to try it and see if it does any better than the other IFind apps I have tried. And as an aside, my "car presence monitoring" is a Dakota 2000 magnetic sensor in the roadway 100 yards up the road tied to an EZIO 4I back in the house because my problem is different; I live at the end of a long private drive and need to know when ANY vehicle approaches, not just specific ones. If no valid PiBeacons are at home, the trigger starts storing the security cam footage , and unless a valid beacon appears on the garage rPi within a minute, I get an alert on my phone. There's no security gate on the drive because there are 2 other houses on the drive and they didn't want to maintain the gate when all the rains a couple of years back shifted it so it wouldn't close..

I tried with Home Remote and it works perfectly, but unfortunately 20m radius is too less and the action is trigger even if not required

Marco, how did you create the Geofence in HomeRemote?
I can't find any button for it in the App!

And the documentation here http://bouncingball.mobi/apps/files/Hom ... _Attribute tells me what it it and what options I have, bu I can't figure out how to create one.
HomeRemote, add action and then?

Yassi

Hi Yassi,
This documents how to get to the Geofence - http://bouncingball.mobi/apps/files/Hom ... ion_Screen

Hi Jon,

oh, ok, I was on the wrong page.
Thanks!

BTW, not related to this thread, but to my TRV issue. Didn't had the time to test it yet, sorry. Hope I can do it this weekend.

Yassi