I have a coworker that swears by his new Lowes Iris system. One thing that he pointed out to me was the fact that his iris system can detect the presence of a key fob in his home. Something he did was program a scene, were if the key fob was no longer detected in the home for longer than 5 mins the house would go in ‘away mode’, where it would lock all doors and arm the alarm.
I know that Aeon Labs recently came out with their own key fob, I’m wondering can something similar be done with that key fob? Would it be able to poll the key fob every 5 minutes and if it didn’t detect anyone perhaps send a message giving the user an option to arm the home? I don’t have a fob, but was wondering if anyone has tried?
Not sure if this is possible with the key fob and even so it would drain the battery of the device pretty quickly. Most battery operated z-wave devices usually sleep and only wake when to report data as needed. There have been a few people on this forum that use other methods to do this. If you do a search on the forum you will find some of these topics. A few methods of using the ping sensor plugin to detect if their phone is on the local network, using 3rd party apps on their phone in combination of apps like tasker, llama, etc on android.
Thanks for the tips Garrett. I was hoping the key fob would work just like my friend’s does on his iris system. My kids don’t have mobile phones and it would be nice to know when they’re home. A key fob would have been great for them. However my wife and I do have have tasker, so I’m going to tinker with it and see how accurate I can get it running.
BTW, are you the author of AutHomationHD? The app looks really good, would I be able to get tasker or llama to run commands to AutHomationHD to run certain scenes, like rakstar did with homebuddy?
Yes, I am the author of AutHomation(HD). The beta version found here:
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,11517.0.html
This version will allow you to work with tasker or llama. You can issue what android calls (intents) to scenes, and devices via those apps. You can also create icons on the home screen for both scenes and devices in this beta. I did notice that I do not have the alarm portion (arming / disarming) in the app for the intents. I will add this into the next beta version.
For your kids, you might want to research into active rfid’s. There was some talk on the forum with this and it was working with older versions of Vera. Not sure if development is still active. Hopefully others on this forum can chime in on some ideas. We have many great people on this forum who are full of them. 
Awesome, my veralite can’t come fast enough so I can test all the stuff I’ve already have setup for it!
Thank you for the active rfid tip. I’ll read more on it and see if it’s something I can make work! My daughters read the post and got all excited cause they think they’re each going to get a phone!