UI7 ▾ Web UI ▾ 7.0.29 GA - April 24, 2019

Your unit is not very loaded. I think you should be fine running the upgrade as is.

I see you used the term “upgrade”, that’s encouraging. I’ll do the update tomorrow and see what happens! Thx

i don’t have any dates…i would like to the team first do their tests to see how the new firmware performs before we commit to dates…as soon as we have something, we will be happy to share.

1 Like

I take back my earlier comments. Geofencing is still un-reliable :frowning:
C

I moved to a custom solution based on IFTTT and a custom functions 1 year ago in order to have a better experience. With my iPhone, I can literally move 10 meters away from my geofence to have it instantly triggering the routing (originating from IFTTT, coming to my Microsoft Azure functions, then thru a custom message queue, then read inside my house from my custom code). My wife with her iPhone: the geofence is triggered very randomly, mostly missing change and making it unusable.

It’s very common to Android, from what I read online. So, just to have a final confirmation: do you have Android?

If you have an iOS device, a much simpler solution is amg0’s iPhone locator. It doesn’t require any additional app on the phone. It uses the native iCloud location service then calculates distance based on google map, all built into the plugin itself. You can also customize the poll frequency and the number of devices to check etc… It’s been working great for me for the past couple of years.

Any similar Android solution?

Yep, iPhone, thanks @therealdb. I shall consider it. Forzaalfa has also given me a solution using Reactor. Which kills two birds :slight_smile:
C

Yeah. Last time I tried, it killed our batteries and wasn’t able to get it to stop. But that’s item 3 I think.

What frustrates me most is this really shouldn’t be a problem!

C

I had the same problem with the battery - plus my wife wanted an Android because it was cheaper. Then I started building a solution myself, while trying to build a POC for a training class, to show how to communicate via the cloud with NAT-ted devices without exposing them (basically, distributed queues). But I disgress.
IFTTT was picked just because I already used it for a couple of minor thing. It works incredibly well for me, because of the underlying iOS architecture.

The battery problem is a setup issue. Draining the battery is a function of how frequently you poll. Some degree of it will happen no matter what solution you use since geofence forces the phone to wake up, locate itself and transmit the data to a cloud server. You can just play with the polling frequency to make it work for your use case. The plugin advantage is that you can do that as opposed to others which have fixed settings and, if not adapted to your use case may seem unreliable.

Of course. Sadly I couldn’t get the balance between battery life and accuracy in the Geofence. I don’t always go a long way away, but if I want the heat and the lights to come on, it needs to happen before I get home (if that makes sense)

C

I’ve been using the vera app for geofence, and haven’t found it to be battery draining on my android phone… the iphone has a battery life of 15 minutes in any case, so no difference there either… :wink:

I think it works well as long as you keep all UI7 functions out of the loop, and lets reactor control it…

Did you try using the time to get home with a divider? It allows you to have a variable poll rate.
I have no issues with battery at all.

I did. Didn’t help :frowning:

I am a heavy phone user, though so that may be a contributing factor.

I refer you to my other comments about what I find my problem is :slight_smile:
C

Sadly though, I believe that if you can’t find a compromise with a custom algorithm for polling frequency, I don’t think any fixed or external one will ever get you what you need… it will either consume your battery or will seem unreliable. I still think that tuning the poll algorithm is your best bet.

Have to disagree, chap. The issue with tuning is that it’s too early or too late. The issue with native geofencing is that circa 30% of the time it doesn’t happen at all When it does work, it’s fine!

C

i have forced all notifications from vera to display on my phone, i can tell you that when it does not work its because it was unable to reach the server, not that it did not trigger.

now usually thats not a connectivity issue on the phone, rather an issue at vera’s end.
while this is not a frequent issue for me, it sure is annoying.

what should be happening, is if it fails to set the new status, it should retry with a set interval, or at least as soon as vera servers are available again, unfortunately it does not, it just gives up and your status does not change.

Thought about a different way: probability is very high that you get good battery life when the app fails and that when it works battery life is shorter… there is no magic here. The phone consumes power to wake up and transmit data no matter what you use. The only way for one solution to drain battery more than the other is for it to poll more frequently…

It is actually more likely that a 3rd party app would consume more power since… the ios device natively already has the location service. Another app will just add an additional transmission. Of course frequency is a big factor here so it isn’t quite the same.

Two years ago, my wife and I got new batteries for our iPhone 6. It made a huge difference on battery life. We set iPhone Locator to 5 minute polls. It has been very reliable and minimal battery use.

Using PLEG and iPhone Locator, Vera knows when we are both gone and sets to Away Mode. If both phones are more than 100 miles away, it sets to Vacation Mode. When either phone is home, it sets to Home Mode. Sometimes, it may take a couple of minutes to know we are home, but that is usually iCloud related.