Investigating move from SmartThings...

I’ve had SmartThings for 5-6 years. Some things work intermittently, so looking at alternatives.

Indigo looks like it will do much more than I need. However, I can’t see how to create the “Someone arrives” and“Everyone Leaves” functions in Indiglo. (I can’t get them to work in SmartThings). Is there an easy way to do that?

If so, I’ll check out the trial when my z-wave stick arrives.

Thanks.

Hello -

Can you say a bit more about how you'd track this specifically? Indigo doesn't have occupancy tracking built in; users that want this as a part of their automation use different hardware and software combinations to achieve this. For example,

- tracking cell phones that are attached to local wifi
- beacons
- third party applications such as Domotics Pad and Home Remote
- motion sensors
- logic

I don’t want an occupancy sensor, I want a presence sensor tied to a handful of people. All have iPhones, so some sort of iPhone solution would be great, be it on local WiFi, gps-based, or similar.

When everyone leaves, I lock doors, close any open garage doors, turn off hot water re-circ pumps, etc, and switch SmartThings to armed mode.
When someone arrives, I turn on the re-circ pumps to a duty cycle schedule, disarm SmartThings, and a few other things like that.

Thanks.

That is what pibeacon does

But it requires some knowledge of raspberry pi

You can have ibeacons as well as iPhone tracked.


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I don’t want an occupancy sensor, I want a presence sensor tied to a handful of people. All have iPhones, so some sort of iPhone solution would be great, be it on local WiFi, gps-based, or similar.

When everyone leaves, I lock doors, close any open garage doors, turn off hot water re-circ pumps, etc, and switch SmartThings to armed mode.
When someone arrives, I turn on the re-circ pumps to a duty cycle schedule, disarm SmartThings, and a few other things like that.

Thanks.

Indigo is very flexible and you have a lot of ways to do this, or combinations of

You can do WiFi based on IP address
Polling from router if you have UniFi router
Geolocation using find a friend
Bluetooth to raspberry pis

And probably many others. You’ll only be spoilt for choice not limitations on how to do it.
That’s a good thing as none are 100% foolproof. You don’t want house to arm or all lights to go off just because you iPhone drops off WiFi for a few minutes.

I accomplish this with the Mikrotik access point(AP) controlled by their wireless controller.

The wireless controller publishes all the devices connected.
Information published for each device is AP name, IP address of client device, Mac Address of the device, uptime and signal strength.
The information is published using the Indigo REST api. Publishing frequency is every minute.

An indigo trigger processes this string and updates a data base(RRDtool). Trend graphs are published every 5 minutes and displayed on a control page.

Some nuances are:
- Setting the signal strength of the the AP so that the neighbor AP's are seen at -85db.
- dropping client receive signal strength if it falls below -85db. This provides a pretty good idea of mobile device location

When I have time I want to experiment with lowering the signal strength to broadcast at -80db at a meter or so and use the presence of the mobile as one factor in an access control solution.

Setting up Mikrotik devices is non trivial. If this logic is/could be implemented on Ubiquity AP's(Seems to be the preferred vendor on the forum) it would provide you with support here.

Might want to check out the Geofency app. Simple setup and has been working very well for us.
It uses the Beacon Indigo plugin to receive locations from the iPhone app.

Carl