I am trying to get lights to turn on when I return home, buy only at night. I tried to do this using Homey but the location detection in Homey was not granular enough. So I implemented in Home using Homekit.
Apart from the granularity issue it seems that the “at night” function doesn’t work, as they switch on regardless of the time of day. I changed from “at night” to "between 6pm and 7am. Same result.
I have read some of the other Q&A’s on this topic and it seems that others are having the same issue, but I couldn’t find any solution proposed.
I could advice you to use home detection, but through the app Smart Presence.
Keep in mind that you need a proper wifi network.
With Smart Presence you reserve a ip-adress of your smartphone in your router.
You give your smartphone this adress in the Homey Smart Presence app, and your set.
Than you can make a flow “when Peter is coming home” and " the time is between", Than “turn on lights” for example.
Or the quick and dirty solution, put a sensor on your door, and make a flow, for example, when your sensor breaks contact, and the time is between, let say, 2300u and 0200u, than turn ligths on.
Firmware v5 (experimental and the eventual stable) doesn’t support SDKv1 apps anymore, which Smart Presence is. So the app needs a complete rewrite before it will work on the new firmware.
@Peter_Bittner Hey mate, I have been using Locative for presence and it has been 99.99% reliable. A couple of glitches at time. You can setup quite a small radius, too. I also use it to turn on the garden lights when I arrive home in the night time.
Indeed, you need to have one more app in your iPhone but at least you are not at the mercy of Athom updating firmware and have a nice app like Smart Presence not working anymore.
P.S. I f I setup the radius to the maximum on Locative I might reach Aspendale (I live in Mentone )
Thanks for everyone’s response. Good to know @danone in the same time zone as myself.
My more pressing issue though, rather than geofencing, is that I cannot get my “At night” to work.
My lights turn on even when I arrive home at midday, and I can’t work out why, hence the pictures I posted. So @danone if you have it working in Mentone maybe you can help me.
Maybe you could use logic. So first create 4 flows in logic app called TimeOfDay. These would be like “if time between 06:00 and 12:00 set TimeOfDay to morning”, “if time between 12:00 and 18:00 set TimeOfDay to afternoon” etc, etc. You can then use the logic “TimeOfDay” in another flow. If TimeOfDay is Evening or Night and my presence is changed to at home then turn on lights.
From the Homekit side. Are you sure that you don’t have multiple automations doing the same but without the time part? Common mistake when test-driving things.
But I assume that if Homey’s geofence isn’t precise enough, Apple’s version won’t be either.
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