It is not intended to be a full controller since we have already a few great ones. My goal is to use the (android) phone to automatically trigger events and run scenes on vera.
I originally created it to have the outside lights on my house turn on when I am approaching the house. I can imagine a lot of other use cases like adjusting the thermostat and even interacting with the security system. Hopefully someone else will find it useful.
I am trying to get someone to create a child forum for this app but for now we can discuss all the details on this thread.
Comments, suggestions and bug reports are welcome.
very interesting app - I have manually set up almost identical set up using timers and the ping sensor - this of course is much cleaner!
how do you prevent against random disconnects? I have a timer that counts down and gets reset with every ping - if the timer completes then a Vswitch is toggled. if a ping fires and the toggle witch is off then it will turn it on and run the scene other wise it will just restart the timer. This way I avoid drop outs and also have to be away from the house for a set period of time before it will work again.
I also had to put a wifi always on app on my phone - this may be a good feature to add into your app?
To be honest I haven’t seen many random disconnects once I am at home. I found issues when I am getting home: it will connect and disconnect immediately after (before the application has a chance to run the scenes). To solve that I wait a second after connecting and before running the scenes; I also retry up to 3 times waiting 3 seconds between each attempt. A second connection in this time frame will just be ignored. The application will also not run scenes again in the next 5 minutes after a good “run”.
What I want to do next is “detect leaving the home”. My first idea is to check the gps every few minutes after you get disconnected from your home network, until it figures out you left home or that you are connected to the network again - of course the re-connection would not trigger the scenes unless it had detected that you left the home. Detecting that I left home for me is almost as interesting as detecting I got home… I could use it to turn lights off and adjust the thermostat for example. The problem of course is getting everybody at home to have android phones
One other idea is have the phone detect whether is charging or not. charging at home can mean I am sleeping. charging and moving can mean that I am on my car going somewhere. charging anywhere else means I am not at home.
Another idea is to play with the bluetooth since my phone will automatically connect to my car.
Why do you need the “wifi always on app”? What does it do? My phone seems to stay connected unless I explicitly disconnect it.
i am using this app
it works well
however i had 1 hickup yesterday
my phone at home lost wifi while sleeping for just a split second
this triggered the scene to trigger
i have not added a lock yet
but could be prolematic if the house unlocked at 4am
is there a way to say ignore wifi connection if previous disconnection was less than x minutes or seconds ago?
that would solve the problem i think
Yes this is what I do but not with this app - same outcome though.
I have ping sensor and Timer and virtual switch. Ping sensor trips timer and switch, timer completes switches off switch. when switch switches on again (timer starts) then welcome home is sounded (or scene desired activated). this avoids intermittent internet drop outs and occasional Wi-Fi drops. it is not by nay means a long term and safe solution however and I some times still get miss fires so but it is only used for vocals for me to do good mornings or good evening etc. its works well enough to be fun but would never use any similar set up for lock or any type of security application.
thank you, i will look in to pleg
i still think it would be nice though
for the android app “welcome home”
to have a “disconnect grace period”
in most cases less than just a few seconds is enough
in android wifi settings in the menu there is a option for wifi allways on, might want to set it.
good idea using PLEG and ping plugins for this. no need for gps this way, this would cause severly impact on the batterylevel and is not that accurate in a building anyways.
my wifi has always been set to always on
in every android phone i have owned
this issue is inexplicable and happens once and a while
the connecttion is dropped and reconnected so quicly you cant even tell
other than the fact that the welcome home scene is run
as far as pleg
i have been looking at it
but still not certain how to use it
Thought I would comment on trying this app. I really like the idea and see how it could be very helpful.
One problem I found is because I have two Wi-Fi networks in my house, if it connects to the “wrong” one when I come to the house it does not trigger. And then later if it drops, and connects to the “right” one it fires the events. In fact if it drops out and reconnects it fires the events again and again each time it reconnects.
I realize that most people don’t use multiple WiFis so its probably not worth trying to sort this out but a simple fix would seem to be to allow the user to select multiple networks from a list of the discovered WiFis and then trigger when it connects to any of them — only once of course but i’m not sure how you would know that (if the dropout time is less than some number of seconds/minutes, etc., maybe?)
good point… im using 4 wireless connections , 2 mine and 2 from the neighbours , so i would be happy to have a choice of which to use and perhaps be able to use it from another wireless going through mios gate.
Just a quick “chirp In” I too have 2 wireless connections but use them in Bridge mode with the same SSID so I don’t have the issue described. this also means I don’t really ever switch connections (I do in theory but for arguments sake) the signal just gets stronger when on the closest connection. A possible solution?
@ Da_JoJo - 2 for your neighbours also hey… does he know lol :o
I use to have my access points with same ssid, however wifi is horrible at changing access points for a stronger signal. It will hold onto the connection for long as it can. I now use different ssid’s and configure the devices to the closest access point. It also allows me to easily switch to the stronger one faster.
[quote=“garrettwp, post:18, topic:176434”]I use to have my access points with same ssid, however wifi is horrible at changing access points for a stronger signal. It will hold onto the connection for long as it can. I now use different ssid’s and configure the devices to the closest access point. It also allows me to easily switch to the stronger one faster.
Garrett[/quote]
Garrett
I’ve tried both ways and separate SSIDs seems to work the best. For a while I did have a range extender running which of course meant the same SSID but the newer routers don’t need that in most residential installations so I got rid of it.
