I would like to use Homey capabilities to be notified when a door is open or a motion is detected when my wife or I are not at home.
The only challenge is to find a reliable way to know if my wife or/and I are at home. And this has to be detected before opening the main door.
I first used geofencing based on the smartphone location. For that, we had the IFTTT mobile app. Each time we enter or leave a defined area, it calls a webservice.
It works 90% of the time. Of course, when the battery of the smartphone is empty, it doesn’t work. I also had a few times where it was not working but I don’t know why.
Then, I wanted to use a bluetooth beacon. I did a few tests with a Tile Mate 2018 and the Beacon app. It never worked very well. Maybe it is a misconfiguration on my side but I saw that many people has the same issue.
Same problem with these as the TS stated, when the battery runs dead the presence detection will think you’re not home anymore because and it will “arm” Homey. I believe the only way to do this is with a physical button (that maybe looks a little nicer than the Zipato one) where you can say if you’re the last one leaving so Homey activates the desired flows.
I’m creating something similar with normal light switches and a LED in it at the front and backdoor, when the LED is on it means Homey is armed, long press the button to disable/enable the flows. So when you’re the last one leaving: press the button and Homey gets armed. When you get home and see that the LED is on: press the button and Homey gets disarmed. You could combine this for automatic disarming with the presence detection, but for arming…
I’m really curious how other people do this so I’m following the thread!
It’s a (very) long read but you can find lost’s of information about using your Homey as a Surveillance system in the Heimdall topic, including several methods to Arm and Disarm
(TIP: It features a Delayed Alarm function that can mitigate the problem of a first method of disarming failing/unavailable giving you the opportunity to use an alternative method of disarming)
Hi,
I just installed the AC PRO.
On the Homey, I installed the application that you mentioned. We I try to add a wifi client, it displays “search for devices” and then "An unknown error has occured (unknown_error).
Frustrating.
I’m creating something similar with normal light switches and a LED in it at the front and backdoor, when the LED is on it means Homey is armed, long press the button to disable/enable the flows.
What switch do you use? Do you activate the LED via Flow from Homey?
The wifi AP is directly connected to my “modem / switch” of my internet provider.
What do you mean by LED ?
In the meantime, I found the “Ubiquiti uniFi Settings” page on Homey.
I run the unifi app on my computer. I don’t have a cloud key.
I tried to put the ip address of the AP as host, but it doesn’t work.
What do I have to define as host in the “Ubiquiti uniFi Settings” page on Homey.
You have to enter the IP of the controller, in this case your computer. The controller (computer) needs to keep running for presence detection to keep working.
Not installed yet, but I’m using normal switches everywhere from Niko (they look the nicest) and there is a model where the LED is inside the switch, just needs some figuring out how to enable/disable the LED from it :-). When I’ll have it installed I’ll surely post a little tutorial!
But you could use any small LED that can be controlled in a flow to set the state of the alarm…
Hi,
Here is a feedback of my solution.
I followed the advice of undertaker. I bought a Ubiquiti wifi access point (AP AC Pro) and a cloud key gen2 plus.
At the beginning, I had so many issues with the access point. I was angry to spend more than 100 eur for a device that doesn’t work as well as the cheap wifi router of my internet service provider. After a chat with Ubiquiti support, they found the issue : one of my cables was not working well. And they were right, after replacing the defect cable, this ubiquiti access point work so well !!!
Arming and disarming the security system works perfectly. The smartphones of the family are detected more or less 5 meters before reaching the main door. When I mean “detected”, the wifi access points detects the connection of known devices. Thanks to Ubiquiti Unifi app for Homey, a change in the wifi connection status triggers a flow.
If someone is interested by more details, I would be happy to help.
