[Reactor] [Dev] Clarifications/Docs for refreshCapabilities and Entity action implementations return types

[CatmanV2]

OK so this is mostly good. There is less functionality than iPhone locator (i.e. ETA isn't trrivial to get out) but still not 100% reliable. I was travelling from Friday to yesterday. I failed to get an update that I'd 'got home' yesterday PM. Mrs C was at home all that time, going to work and back, and reported perfectly so I have to assume it's a configuration / implementation on my phone.

C

[MikeReadington]

@catmanv2 Same here, it works but not 100% reliable. A few misses that seem to correlate to if I am on the phone or not. I really miss the reliability iPhone locator.

[therealdb]

It's 100% reliable for me and my Wifi routers are doing the 0,001% of the edge cases.
I'm using my WIFI routers to confirm I'm home (when it's not triggering directlty) and I'll soon add ESPresence to the mix (mainly for cars, but we'll see).

[CatmanV2]

@therealdb are you EU or US? I suspect there's some data 'protection' witchery going on. Or at least some phone based config that is not directly in the app itself. (I mean my phone is always asking me if I want such and such an app to continue to access my location. I imagine missing one of those notifications is going to break stuff....)

C

[therealdb]

@catmanv2 I'm based in Italy, so that makes me under GDPR. I'm even the CISO for our company, so I know how hard it is. But given OwnTracks is totally self-hosted, I don't think GDPR is the culprit - well, not in this case.

[CatmanV2]

Hmm interesting. Perhaps it's just UK

C

[CatmanV2]

So came home tonight. My phone says 'entering home'. MSR doesn't. Not had a dig yet

<Edit>

OK that's interesting. Owntracks was reporting that the network was down. I have a. VPN to my home system, which doesn't respond if you're on the network (if that make sense).

As soon as I disconnected from the VPN, bingo. Soooooo need to either sort out the VPN from local (which seems daft) or get some automatic disconnect.

C

[therealdb]

@catmanv2 that's why I'm publishing to an http endpoint that's relaying the message inside my mqtt server (internal). Maybe a public mqtt broker linked to your internal one is easier.

[CatmanV2]

@therealdb thing is I know from other apps that when the phone transitions from 4(5)G to WiFi and is connected on the VPN it loses connectivity. I knew this intellectually but now I know it in my bones as it were.

So it won't talk to the HTTP endpoint either...... It won't talk to anything.

I've seen it often enough with mail and Slack but never really added two and two

C

[tamorgen]

It’s funny, back in August there was an issue with iPhoneLocator. It was an add-on integration that I couldn’t live without. It fixed itself magically after 3 or 4 days, but it put me on the road to looking for a Vera alternative.

Ezlo kept making promises, but I felt like I was going to be kept being strung along if I switched to Ezlo. It felt like they were stringing users along with basic functionality, like geofencing.

In September I switched to Home Assistant, and I haven’t looked back. Everything works so much better. The built in geofencing of the companion app works flawlessly. I have four users, that just needed an account on my instance, and I know if they are home or not, and I can depend on it for my automation.

Integrations that stopped working or worked unreliably on Vera years ago work perfectly. My Nest thermostat works again with my home automation. I can use Google Calendar with ease.

Not to disparage Vera for the innovation they did years ago, but for anyone still on the platform, run! Vera has essentially been abandoned

[gwp1]

@tamorgen If you're using Home Assistant look into iCloud3. It replaces the native iCloud integration and is much, much more reliable. You can find it in HACS.

Oh - and the level of detail you can pull into MSR is wonderful.

[tamorgen]

@gwp1 said in iPhone location or alternative.:

@tamorgen If you're using Home Assistant look into iCloud3. It replaces the native iCloud integration and is much, much more reliable. You can find it in HACS.

Oh - and the level of detail you can pull into MSR is wonderful.

I did try it for a while, but I kept getting annoying emails from Apple that my iCloud account was signed into. There is a ton of detail on it, but frankly, all I needed to know was whether a particular user was at my home or not. The companion app works perfectly well for that simple task

[gwp1]

@tamorgen I found the trick of triggering from iC3's zone_name within MSR virtually eliminates false GPS drift from suddenly shutting my house down around me only to open it back up again when it course-corrects.

I don't get those emails - I think I did initially and don't recall what I did to stop them. iCloud does, now and then, force a reconfirmation dialogue but that's easy 2FA stuff.

[CatmanV2]

@tamorgen said in iPhone location or alternative.:

It’s funny, back in August there was an issue with iPhoneLocator. It was an add-on integration that I couldn’t live without. It fixed itself magically after 3 or 4 days, but it put me on the road to looking for a Vera alternative.

Ezlo kept making promises, but I felt like I was going to be kept being strung along if I switched to Ezlo. It felt like they were stringing users along with basic functionality, like geofencing.

In September I switched to Home Assistant, and I haven’t looked back. Everything works so much better. The built in geofencing of the companion app works flawlessly. I have four users, that just needed an account on my instance, and I know if they are home or not, and I can depend on it for my automation.

Integrations that stopped working or worked unreliably on Vera years ago work perfectly. My Nest thermostat works again with my home automation. I can use Google Calendar with ease.

Not to disparage Vera for the innovation they did years ago, but for anyone still on the platform, run! Vera has essentially been abandoned

Thread merge!

C

[tamorgen]

@gwp1 said in iPhone location or alternative.:

@tamorgen I found the trick of triggering from iC3's zone_name within MSR virtually eliminates false GPS drift from suddenly shutting my house down around me only to open it back up again when it course-corrects.

I don't get those emails - I think I did initially and don't recall what I did to stop them. iCloud does, now and then, force a reconfirmation dialogue but that's easy 2FA stuff.

You know, looking back, I don’t think I was using IC3. I think I was using the Apple ICloud integration native to HA, not HACS. I’ll take a look at a closer look at IC3. Might give me some added functionality I don’t know I need