What is current best practice for iOS home/away detect?

Posted on
Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:55 pm
DaveL17 offline
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Re: What is current best practice for iOS home/away detect?

I feel that we've got hung up on Shortcuts. The OP asked for current best practices and I was pointing out that the Shortcuts app is not a best practice because of the "lock down".

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Posted on
Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:06 pm
dliccardo offline
Posts: 53
Joined: Jun 09, 2014

Re: What is current best practice for iOS home/away detect?

Hi All,

Thanks for you comments and suggestions. I decided to try moving from the solution I described to using the virtual device for each person + iOS home app automation approach suggested in this thread. I'm happy to report that it is working beautifully after a few days without the latency and occasional missed home-away state transition (so far!). Here is what I am doing:

(1) Enabled the virtual device interface.
(2) Created a virtual device -> Virtual On/Off Device for each family member.
(3) THE TRICKY PART: For whatever reason, by default a Virtual On/Off device can't be turned on. (I think Indigo should change this. The default should be a virtual on/off device behaves like a switch and has its own onOffState like every other switch.) So for each virtual device/person, you must:
(a) create an indigo variable to use an a boolean for each person being home or away.
(b) Create an action group that sets this variable to true
(c) create another action group that sets this variable to false
(d) Edit the device settings of the virtual switch:
(i) select checkbox "Supports Status" and choose the variable for this person as the Status Variable.
(ii) choose action group (b) as On Group and action group (c) as Off Group
(4) Add all your new virtual switch family members to your HomeKitLink bridge
(5) Add automations in iOS or Mac OS Home app for each person:
(a) When they arrive turn switch on.
(b) when they leave turn switch off.

That's it! Now you should see these switches change state each time a person leaves or arrives and you can go to town on various other logic and triggers in Indigo.

Posted on
Fri Jun 09, 2023 3:34 pm
Londonmark offline
Posts: 509
Joined: Feb 29, 2012

Re: What is current best practice for iOS home/away detect?

Glad you’ve got it working. There’s loads you can now trigger from the virtual device states…

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