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FollowMe Find My iPhone Geofence Driver


phileaton

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Thanks, I appreciate it.   

I used the driver for the first time last night and loved it.  was driving away from the house and everything locked up. Just felt weird driving away w/o locking anything.  I added a little timer so that if for some reason the garage door doesnt go down automatically it sends me a text.

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By the way. I think I have a solution for the delay in triggering events. The driver wasn't giving devices enough time to report thier location back to iCloud so it was often using the last known location which resulted in a delay. It's a little tricky to debug since I have to do it while my wife is driving or keep stoping to vpn into my home system. I'm testing it out and hope to post an update next week. I plan to do the next release through the website I'm setting up so I can start automatically issuing keys and people won't have to wait to get the driver up and running.

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Thanks, I appreciate it.

I used the driver for the first time last night and loved it. was driving away from the house and everything locked up. Just felt weird driving away w/o locking anything. I added a little timer so that if for some reason the garage door doesnt go down automatically it sends me a text.

Sounds great. I'm glad you like it, but I highly suggest keeping that timer. There are some known bugs with delays in events firing and even then it's dependent on iCloud, gps and cell signals among other things which are not absolutely dependable. I use it for less critical events like turning off all the lights and the thermostats and have it try to arm the alarm in case I forgot, but I still do it myself just in case. I'm sure everyone know this but I just wanted to clarify.

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Sounds great. I'm glad you like it, but I highly suggest keeping that timer. There are some known bugs with delays in events firing and even then it's dependent on iCloud, gps and cell signals among other things which are not absolutely dependable. I use it for less critical events like turning off all the lights and the thermostats and have it try to arm the alarm in case I forgot, but I still do it myself just in case. I'm sure everyone know this but I just wanted to clarify.

Youre doing a great job Phil. Keep it up. It gets better with every release.

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Sounds great. I'm glad you like it, but I highly suggest keeping that timer. There are some known bugs with delays in events firing and even then it's dependent on iCloud, gps and cell signals among other things which are not absolutely dependable. I use it for less critical events like turning off all the lights and the thermostats and have it try to arm the alarm in case I forgot, but I still do it myself just in case. I'm sure everyone know this but I just wanted to clarify.

Here is my logic:

 

This works well for me. I have it set to 1250 seconds when I'm at my work location, about 17 miles from home.

 

As long as I'm not talking on the phone, this has been right on. I set my trigger distance to .5 miles again.

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Phil,

How should we handle to new driver through synapse?  should we delete the old one and install this one as new?

Sorry, I should have clarified this. You should delete the old driver. Hopefully with the new auto updater this will be the last time you have to add or delete the driver.

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I already sent out this info to all the beta testers earlier today, but I wanted to post it here for anyone I may have missed or anyone who is still interested in testing the driver.

 

First of all, I set up a website and branded the driver. You can now get a copy from Synapse Home Automation at www.synapseha.com. If anyone is interested, in addition to computers I have a background is in medicine with an interest in neuroradiology so Synapse was a good fit and the domain name was available :)

 

With the new site you will get a key instantly instead of waiting for me to generate one. This is a lot easier on everyone. Several people have already downloaded and activated their keys and the feedback I am getting seems to be that the system is working well. As Adam pointed out, you should delete the old driver since it won't be useful anymore.

 

The new version has a lot of enhancements. The one I am most proud of is an auto update feature that should eliminate the need for repeated driver downloads and reinstalls. It also has what I think is much improved accuracy in obtaining location data and firing events. Thanks to everyone for helping me with this. I hope you are finding that it makes your Control4 system more useful. 

 

By the way, I set up a blog at http://www.synapseha.com/blog/ where I will post updates as well. 

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Here is my logic:

 

This works well for me. I have it set to 1250 seconds when I'm at my work location, about 17 miles from home.

 

As long as I'm not talking on the phone, this has been right on. I set my trigger distance to .5 miles again.

Are you a Verizon or Sprint iPhone user.  The ATT and TMobile iPhones can do data and voice at the same time so I would expect they can respond to a find my iPhone request even if you are on the phone.

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Starting to get false triggers several times per day.  Sitting in the house just a bit ago and my goodbye routine fired thinking I was gone.

 

running the newest version, triggers are set to .5 miles. 

 

Were you sufficiently inside that the GPS would not find a signal, then the location would be based on the cell tower which could be > 0.5 miles away.

Can you / the device / the driver have a validity check to see if the phone is attached to the home WiFi

 

If phone is > 0.5 miles away AND ping to IP address of phone (static through DHCP reservation) is null then AWAY

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Were you sufficiently inside that the GPS would not find a signal, then the location would be based on the cell tower which could be > 0.5 miles away.

Can you / the device / the driver have a validity check to see if the phone is attached to the home WiFi

 

If phone is > 0.5 miles away AND ping to IP address of phone (static through DHCP reservation) is null then AWAY

 

I should have had a good signal but anything is possible   

 

like the idea of a wifi check 

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Yes, anything is possible. I'd be interested if anyone else is having similar false triggers. I know it's a long shot, but another situation that will trigger events to fire is the driver restarting. Your system wouldn't have reset for any reason? Power failure, etc?

 

I like the idea of a WiFi check, but am going to avoid adding any new features for now unless it really become necessary. Is there a built in method of doing a ping in the programing logic? 

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Since installing the latest driver polling occurs every 60s no matter what I set as limits in either maximum or at location.Programming an event changing the polling interval has no effect whatsoever.

The battery drain is identical as with the initial driver.Had to turn off polling altogether prior to going to bed last night thinking it might have no impact but right now ON/OFF is the only control I have on polling.

Will play around with the smart polling ON/OFF setting......

 

 

P

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Are you a Verizon or Sprint iPhone user.  The ATT and TMobile iPhones can do data and voice at the same time so I would expect they can respond to a find my iPhone request even if you are on the phone.

I am a sprint user :(. I used to run their National 3rd psarty distribution, so I have an awesome ex employee plan. Its the only reason I stay with them

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If I stay off the phone when I'm headed to my house, I have found this works every time. (see thumnail for logic)

 

I have mine set to poll at 21 minutes (1250) when I am at a location. (work/home)

 

Then when I am not at a location and >10 miles, it switches to every 10 minutes.

 

From there it decreases down to 30 seconds when I'm 2-3 miles away.

 

Has worked well for my situation, driving 15 miles to work and home. It doesnt burn my battery by polling 3x per hour all day, but when I leave and it sees that,

 

it drastically lowers the polling times so I can't get home without it poling once in my 5. trigger range.

 

I do have to manually turn it off when I'm home for the night.

 

Would like to see an automatable way to turn polling updates on and off through a built in scheduler and not the control4 scheduling agent.

 

Schrady

 

 

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Since installing the latest driver polling occurs every 60s no matter what I set as limits in either maximum or at location.Programming an event changing the polling interval has no effect whatsoever.

The battery drain is identical as with the initial driver.Had to turn off polling altogether prior to going to bed last night thinking it might have no impact but right now ON/OFF is the only control I have on polling.

Will play around with the smart polling ON/OFF setting......

P

So it looks like there is a bug that shows up if your controller gets reset. I haven't completly traced it out, but the temporary solution is to reset the device name property for each of your devices. I will try to get it fixed and send out a fix.

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Starting to get false triggers several times per day. Sitting in the house just a bit ago and my goodbye routine fired thinking I was gone.

running the newest version, triggers are set to .5 miles.

I have been trying to look into this. If I set my trigger distance below about .3 miles I also get false triggers. If your units are km then this is about 0.5 km. The location accuracy varies just a little each time the device sends data to apple. So, occasionally if I am set at say 0.1 to 0.3 it will come back a little over this from time to time. More frequently, the lower the trigger distance. It is usually when the device is reporting the location base on cell signals. I may add the option to only accept GPS based locations in an update, but the best short term solution is probably just increasing the trigger distance a bit. I usually use 0.5 miles which is about 0.8 km. Depending on your signal strength you may need more or less.
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So now that I am watching this more closely I'm noticing more false triggers, all with cell based location. I went from 0 miles to 2.4 miles away in a 3 minute period all while inside the house. I'll definitely add an option to only accept gps locations.

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So now that I am watching this more closely I'm noticing more false triggers, all with cell based location. I went from 0 miles to 2.4 miles away in a 3 minute period all while inside the house. I'll definitely add an option to only accept gps locations.

Just a quick FYI Phil, but GPS does not do very well in bldg. Our phones use a combo of last GPS and a triangulation of cell sites to determine.

 

I'ma ll for accuracy, but  alot of people who work in office bldgs will lose GPS signal, but they will get cell covergae.

 

Making it an on/option would be cool.

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Great point. I actually think I found a solution which I'm testing now. Apple returns an estimated accuracy each time it returns location data. I set a threshold of about .1 miles for accuracy. So wether location is gps, cell, or wifi based it will still trigger events as long as the accuracy is reasonable. I'm running errands today and set lots of locations to trigger emails so if it works I'll push the update tonight.

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