How I know I am home

[Steve Hume]

James is correct, it is a battery management issue.  I am not aware of an App that does what you want.  It is possible but it could likely get into modes of using up your battery.  GPS can run in the background with varying degrees of checking for location.  What you need is an App that recognizes entry to a zone and then turns on GPS to full Navigation mode and then again triggers something when you get close to home.


If you are willing to push a button or do a “hey Siri” into an Apple watch then other things are possible.  I suspect HomeKit will allow for Siri commands and those could start from Apple Watch in handsfree “Hey Siri” mode.


Steve Hume
> On Jun 5, 2015, at 4:35 PM, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:
> 
> I dont actually think it’s broken in iOS, I think it works perfectly for 99.9% of people using the thing. 
> 
> This whole idea of registering the geofence with the system and letting them wake up your program and tell you something happened is Apple’s answer to having background apps waste your battery. Instead of staying awake and constantly running the GPS the system can manage it with whatever resolution of time and position that they think is proper given the battery and so forth. There is no way to control the interval that it checks, thats just how the system solves this particular problem. I really dont think they are going to “fix” it, as this IS the fix. To let the system decide when it needs to check the GPS against the table of registered geofences.
> 
> I also tried the wifi and ard trick to find if my iPhone was on the network, but it didn’t work nearly as well for me as it did for Rich. If you’re using the iPhone then it will join the network instantly, if it’s just in your pocket then it doesn’t. At least mine didn’t. And the wifi system sleeps for several minutes in a row and is only ping’able on the network every 15 minutes or so while it’s not being used.  So it took more than 15 minutes to figure out I was gone, and took me waking the phone up to do something to realize I was there. You should probably still experiment with this as Rich is so positive about it it’s possible I was doing something else goofy ;)
> 
> I also do not believe that your micro-cell or anything else can be interfering with the timing, I think thats just how it works and I dont think Apple is going to think it’s broken and therefore wont be able to fix it.
> 
> I’ve got a desk covered in 433mhz radios that are used for things like active RFID right now, there aren’t any ready solutions here yet but that is something I’m going to experiment with. If it needs to be an iPhone solution and not a some device in the car solution then you’re left with ibeacons or some fuzzy logic with what Paul just suggested about using a location further away as the geofence that you must pass through in order to leave or come home. Moving it down the road the only direction you can approach the house. If you know that your, or your wifes car just left and then her phone passthrough the geofence 3 minutes later you know she left. Same on approach. 
> 
> With an iBeacon there wouldn’t be a way to cover the entire house and yard, but it would be very possible to put one in a waterproof box between the parking spots so that anybody going outside would immediately trigger that. You’d get triggers if people were just outside. But if the car left within some time of the beacon trigger then you could assume that the person that triggered it had actually left in the car. 
> 
> Either that or you’re going to have to figure out how to do whatever it is you need to do while still dealing with the fact that you might not find out she’s arrived till after she hits the garage door button. 
> 
> It might also be possible to replace the garage door remotes with some remote that we could get into XTension. There are many 433mhz remotes that might work with the receivers I’m experimenting with now. And then XTension would know exactly which car the button was pressed in to open or close the garage door and then it could control a relay to do the actual garage door opening and closing. This means that you’d need to build XTension into the garage door system and it means that XTension would need to be working properly in order for you to get out of the garage ;) But the regular opener could still be kept in the glove compartment for when things inevitably go south…
> 
> Just thinking out loud, but the parameters you’ve set just aren’t going to be exactly met with anything currently available and waiting for apple to fix something that they dont think is a bug isn’t going to yield any relief.
> 
> 
>> On Jun 5, 2015, at 2:00 PM, Gordon Meyer <bb at g2meyer.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Not to continue beating you over the head, but I feel it’s worth noting that waiting for Apple to address this in iOS is like waiting for them to fix the weather. Think about all the moving parts that this sort of thing requires: iPhone hardware -> iOS -> cellular baseband -> cell company -> cell infrastructure -> Internet backbone -> home Internet connection. And that doesn’t even factor in the GPS. Not to be totally flippant or dismissive, but it’s amazing it works at all.
> 
> Thanks,
> 	James
> 
> 
> James Sentman                       http://sentman.com		http://MacHomeAutomation.com
> 
> 
> 
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