this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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One of the wifi integrations would still work if your router/Access Point is supported. You just need the MAC address for whatever phone.
The only "gotcha" for the wifi presence detection is you'll have to change a setting on everyone's phone to "use device MAC address". Android and iOS both use randomized MAC addresses for wifi to prevent tracking, but tracking is what we want to do.
Doesn't the companion app have gps access? I haven't looked into it very closely since I was already using life360. I thought there was a tracking sensor as part of the phone (separate from life360) that may be able to be used? I do rather like the randomized mac address setting on our phones.
Yes, the companion app could potentially replace L360 for your automations if your parents are willing to install it on their phones.
I've never used the location sensor as part of the HA app, so I don't know how quickly/often it updates.
For the WiFi detection, fortunately your phone setting is on a per-SSID basis. You'd still have random MAC addresses everywhere in the world except for your home SSID, which will use the same one every time allowing HA to know when you're home/away.
Good to know about the Mac address thing, I've never looked at it that close or realized that.
What I'm hoping is this gets fixed and I don't have to change things! But good to know there are options.
I came to say exactly what OP is saying. For your parents phones you just have to go in to their setting and turn the random Mac address off (for your WiFi) then if you go into the Known Devices yaml you can search for their (real) Mac addresses and rename the tracker to "Mums phone"
Then you can fire automations based on the presence of that device on your WiFi.
Bonus point is you can then have your Guest Mode trigger when your parents show up too, based off their Mac address. If you do this for all your friends that regularly show up you can have an automated Guest Mode.
Saying this as someone who used to use Life360, but it was a bit flaky and they are selling user data, so I switched to just the HA app and trackers
I'll definitely keep this in mind... They (some HA devs figured out a fix for life360) so with a small change to one file it's back up. I should probably migrate off, 360 but the whole circle uses.l if for life 360 stuff.
Thanks!