I’m quite new to this came but have a use case for using google latitude to track location, has anyone thought of this or used another google API and could possibly share some code, I’ve not programmed for years so need a little help here. I think its a long shot for me to figure it out unless i can get a few pointers.
“The Doctor is In/Out”
So what are your requirements?
How many Google users would you support? I think you could start with building one plugin per user and allow multiple plugins.
Where on the dashboard would such a plugin live? It could be for the whole house, or just a room in the house… Let the user decide.
I would imagine…
[ul][li]the plugin would have a radio button (or configuration) to disable/enable the user’s location status.[/li]
[li]the plugin would have a radio button (or configuration) to disable/enable to nearest city/enable to most accurate the displaying of the user’s location on the badge.[/li]
[li]the plugin would perform an automatic location update/checkin when receiving a trigger event from a door lock. E.g. door code 1234 would trigger Dad’s plugin, code 2345 would trigger Mom’s plugin, code 3456 would trigger kid’s plugin, etc.[/li]
[li]the plugin would perform a checkin if any number of sensors triggered the event (door/window, motion, etc. There’s no degree of certainty of identity with something this simple.[/li]
[li]the plugin would perform a checkin if a button or the proper code was entered on a wall-mounted scene controller[/li]
[li]a cool DIY device could detect a particular bluetooth device being present and could create a trigger/event for this plugin[/li]
[li]another cool DIY device would be a wall-mounted fingerprint reader that would send events to the appropriate scenes and Google Latitude plugins.[/li]
[li]…maybe the plugin could update other web-based apps such as foursquare, brightkite, gowalla, loopt, etc.[/li][/ul]
I was using this in homeseer. The only problem was the inaccurate GPS reporting from Google. It did work well most of the time. If you want to see how other have used see the homeseer forum.
My initial requirement is to basically have an event trigger when I am less than x miles from home or then plug that info into google maps to figure how many minutes google expects me to be home in etc.
the homeseer one looks like its been developed quite well, I guess one could hack that to run on its own webserver and then use lua to call information which that plugin generates but seems a little bit excessive.
Brientim and Trouty00,
So rather than wanting the house to become a check-in location for Google, Latitude, you want a Google Latitude appliancation on Vera’s Dashboard. Since you have to use a laptop or smartphone to access Vera, why not use the laptop and surf to https://www.google.com/latitude or use the Google Latitude app in the smartphone? You want to trigger scenes based on the friend being tracked on Google Latitude is within a certain radius … hmm the Vacation home can detect that guests are coming over. The front porch light can turn on. The vacation home can warm up to a livable temperature. The lights can be set to the coming home scene so that the kids can find their way in the house and the groceries can get unpacked in the refrigerator. OK … I’m beginning to get it.
What if on this trip, you weren’t going to the vacation home, but somewhere else close? Do you want the house to go setting up scenes?
No problem. We can design both a “The Doctor is in” and “Where’s the Doctor?”
Hello,
I used it in homeseer to trigger events. It was set to check google latitude every n minutes to determine my current location, you set location and radius to determine if an event is triggered. E.g. My home 500 metres. Of courses, you could have a virtual switch to turn it off. By the way, I don’t need a laptop or mobile to know where I am, I just look around :o
So basically, instead of time based scenes, it was location based trigger. The main thing I picked up was others were using it for security, leaving home, lock deadlock, arm sensors and alarm on etc. and of course the holiday house… I never used it to monitor friends., just my family and I. Homeseer just meant it was one portal to gather information and in some way was better than google’s own site. I would say, that quite a few times, latitude would throw a wobbly and put me in random location or would not update, so there was reliability issues. I also had problems with homeseer recently and havent set it back up again.
I tend to use Vera more then homeseer pro at the moment but I can see the use that others would get out of having it in vera. One portal, one password and hopefully confidence that thing will happen when they want them too. ;D
Ideally, you would not need to poll Google latitude, but to receive its notifications as your cellphone or laptop updates its latitude location.
I think we can put all of this functionality into one plug-in app. If we can tie down the requirements, I’m sure we can write the code to support both a proximity-based checkin or positive location-based updates Google latitude. Also, we should be able to trigger scenes to run things in the house.
interesting discussions going on here. My use case is that I know I work a 60 mile commute to work each day and i can leave the office any where in between 5 and 9.30. One I want to notify my OH where abouts i am maybe displaying this on a monitor somewhere or playing a audio message through my squeezebox system and also so the heating is not on being wasted while I am not there, I guess this could also plugin to the google calender plugin so if it sees an event saying “visting friends” for example then this is ignored.
The whole vera system I think could be a little better integrated, with homeseer you can have so many different scenarios and if,what,else,or statements then you can really get creative, I know Vera has this ability but shame you have to code it manually, I don’t know why this cannot be achieved in simple drop downs.
I guess what I am thinking is
If MON > FRI excluding Public holiday
and time is >17:00 and <22:00
and Google calendar <> “visiting friends”
and GoogleLattitudeStu.distancefromhome = <30
Turn heating ON and Squeezebox play file “stu is 30 minutes form home”
I’m sure there are other uses, what I am learning more and more with HA is you have to really know how the users lifestyle to really develop a custom system and maybe that’s where LUUP really does add flexibility but I would think the above should all be encapsulated in a trigger.
This sounds like geofencing. “Approaching” & “Arrived” at the destination (home) maybe a “Departing” from origin with different actions factored on distance & duration (heating / cooling vs lights etc). If reliability (timeliness?) is an issue unsure how to mitigate.
I think maybe only by doing multiple checks over as a 5 minute period or as long as you can without it having impact on usefulness. I mean you would want to be certain if you were going to be triggering heating so one the trigger goes of if < 30 miles, then check 2 minutes later and make sure the distance is lower, do this a few times and then trigger the event.
I have history enabled on my lattitude account and it seems relatively accurate
Trouty,
I think your comments for configuring scene triggers with drop-down menus are a pretty good idea. However, that we should probably cross-post into the UI discussions. We can discuss the development of a plugin here.
I’m glad this conversation is eliciting the requirements rather well… With the proper requirements nailed-down, we can make it a group project to actually build this plugin, if you want. It would be my first.
So if I’m hearing you all right, for this plugin to work right, we need the plugin to have both proximity-based and positive check-in capabilities. Also, we need positive and proximity-based checkout capabilities. With the proper code in the scenes, we can set the thermostat, play an announcement or scroll a news-flash across the bottom on the TV.
Proximity Check-in:
If Google Latitude reports that Stu is within some distance, proximity scenes can be triggered. The plugin sets a variable indicating Stu’s new distance from home. The previous value is moved to another variable. Stu’s location would not be updated in Google Latitude for this case.
Positive Check-in:
If you come home and push the “stu is in” button on a scene contoller, or if Stu just opened the front door, or if Stu’s RFID from his keys was just detected, or the bluetooth from his cellphone was just detected, etc. The plugin sets a variable indicating Stu’s distance from home is Zero. The previous value is moved to another variable. Check-in scenes can be triggered. Stu’s location can be updated to Google Latitude.
Positive Check-out:
Before leaving if the “stu is out” button is pushed on a scene controller, the plugin sets a variable indicating Stu’s new distance from home. The previous value of zero is moved to another variable. If the previous location was home, check-out scenes can be triggered. Latitude needs to be updated.
Proximity Check-out:
If an update from Google Latitude is received that Stu is no longer home, the plugin sets a variable indicating Stu’s new distance from home. The previous value of zero is moved to another variable. If the previous location was home, check-out scenes can be triggered. Since the location did not come from Latitude, it should not be updated.
Privacy:
the plugin would have a radio button (or configuration) to disable/enable the updating of user’s location status.
the plugin would have a radio button (or configuration) to disable/enable to nearest city/enable to most accurate the displaying of the user’s location on the badge.
Location Badge:
Do we want to / can we include code to display the Google Latitude Location badge on the dashboard?
Do we want to generalize this app so that it will work with a number of other apps? (maybe in a future release)
Are there any more requirements we need to capture before we can write code?
Google Latitude API[url=http://code.google.com/apis/latitude/v1/getting_started.html]http://code.google.com/apis/latitude/v1/getting_started.html[/url]
Kgrr,
I’m actually shocked that it hasn’t come up before and tbh surprised when I cracked open the vera for the first time to find this wasn’t a feature and anything complex you have to go straight to Lua programming, not particularly user friendly as something I have been very used to when using homeseer 6 years ago as a uni project and now more recently as a trial.
I also notice that the new fibaro home crontroller is pushing this as a feature (obv knowing its competition, Vera doesn’t have this ability)
I will put a post in the UI page.
as for this plugin, I would like to get involved but im not a programmer whatsoever so may be slow but happy to assist where i can. with regards to the dashboard maybe we can capture the badge page as a image file and then import it like a camera the sameway as one of the squeezbox plugin captures artwork.
stu
Stu,
There is another side to the coin. I don’t have a problem with Vera being open and accessible to a language like Lua or UpNp data structures to do more complex things. For example, to do more complex things with Microsoft Excel, you have access to Visual Basic. Many instruments that I have worked with use a Lab-view type interface. It would be horribly confining to have nothing but the basic menus to work with. My experience of the Schlage-Link bridge is that it’s nicely menu driven but unable to even talk to a sensor.
I suspect that Fibaro is a Mios-based system with a different UI wrapped on it.
Don’t worry about being or not being a programmer. Speed is not of the importance to me. It’s developing it together as a project. I see too many apps that are posted, but there’s no discussion on how it works and how others can learn how to do a plug-in.
Why don’t we start with a simple app that displays the user’s Latitude Badge Image and then add more functionality?
Hello
good idea I can not wait .
If you are still gathering requirements, I would love to see “the opposite” case. Specifically, when I leave the house and get about a mile away, I want a trigger that will let me check the state of the garage door, fireplace, door locks, etc and send myself a notification on my phone. (Something like, “Hey dummy! You left the garage door open!”)
After my parents lost a significant number of tools when a garage was left open, I am a little paranoid. I often end up circling back to double check that I closed it. ;D
FWIW - I would be willing to help out a bit. I don’t have a ton of spare time, but I can code in just about any language you would want. (And, a few you wouldn’t.
What is the status about this plugin? Would love to use it!
to my knowledge nothing has really started, I certainly haven’t started anything as just dont have the time really and dont really know where to start to even to start something basic.
I’m not sure if kgrr began any work, I am still interested in trying to figure this out though if i find some time.
Stu
I’m sorry I left this thread dormant for a while. I am still interested in making a google latitude plugin.
I use instamapper (free) for displaying both my phone gps location and my sons. Would it be easier to tie a plugin into something like this?
The Google API is out there and free also. It ties into all sorts of applications.