Well I think that’s probably more of an individual decision. Honestly if you hadn’t offered the geofences (and possibly iBeacons) I would have stuck with using Homewave as my sole Vera app. Right now I still prefer it over iViri as far as mobile control. iViri does offer voice control but it’s not something I’ve decided I need to have right now. So if iViri or a paired down sibling of iViri is all I have to run in the background for geofences then that suits my personal needs. But I’m sure others will offer up what they think as well. Either way I hope you don’t admit defeat as I think you’ve taken the right steps to give Vera iOS users some much needed functionality!
That would be awesome. PM Sent. Thanks very much!
Whats the reason for not being on iOS 7? Not judging just curious if it is hardware limitations or if you are jail broken, etc…? We had a running post going longer ago before it went live in the Apple store and there was no comments from anyone to support a release any earlier than iOS 7.0, so if you have a good reason I will be more than happy to re-evaluate that decision and make it backwards compatible.[/quote]
Yes I am jb’d. But more importantly I use several iPads and iPhones laying around for house control. I have I devices going back to an iPhone 3 and iPad 1 in use. These devices will never use IOS 7. I don’t want these devices to look different from each other so family members or guests will not get confused using them. So everything is on 6.1.2.
I am sure a lot of people have jb’d devices they don’t want to lose. Also since the demise of SQ Remote, it is not useable on IOS 7. That is a big one.
If you do make it for IOS 6, I will try it.
Nice plug for the iPhonePlugin 
(no pun intended)… I actually used the iPhonePlugin for some time which is why I ended up adding this functionality to iViri. Not only does this not require any fine tuning, it just uses Cell Tower Triangulation and there is zero battery hit and nothing really to worry about or fine tune or have to remember to switch your mute button, etc. You don’t have to wait for a poll to occur so for your home scene to trigger as you walk into the house and make it half way through before your house reacts to your presence. Instead with iViri the app just reacts to the enter/exit of a geographic region and changes your switch. On top of that this technology is now being coded one step further to make your environment become aware of your presences by using ibeacons. This second part is currently under development but it will finally bring to iOS what RFID has been doing and NFC for Android.[/quote]
I bought and tried your app because I liked the idea of simplifying the process of detecting when my wife or I arrive home. With iPhonelocator I have to use two device plugins for each phone because GPS occasionally reports a momentary jump in location which results in the re-triggering of a scene (Two at home and two at the neighborhood entrance). I Tried to mitigate this with the Ping Sensor plugin, but it is unreliable. Having my garage door automated complicates things due to the fact that it takes 8 seconds to register that it is open. It registers being closed immediately and I refuse to add a second sensor for when it opens because it is impractical.
With the iPhoneLocator plugin I get consistent results regarding when it opens, i.e. it is either just opening as it comes into view or it begins opening shortly after coming into view. The view distance being a mere 50-75 feet.
You specifically mention not having to be halfway through the house before a scene fires upon arriving home while using your app, implying that perhaps that was your experience with iPhoneLocator. With your app I get very inconsistent results mirroring that scenario. I might pull into the drive way and have to wait a whole minute before the garage opens.
So, just to be clear, I am not complaining. I’ve read your other posts and also understand what a Herculean task it is that you’ve undertaken here and I applaud you. You have also asked for feedback on the possibility of a Geofence only app. I for one would totally pay again for such functionality, provided that it had the same responsiveness as the iPhonelocator plugin.
Given the constraints that Apple imposes, would it be possible to invoke a more frequent location update once a user is within a designated range of a geofence by beggining to manually poll a user’s location? Or by whatever other means necessary to achieve good responsiveness.
@awake - so I’m confused at first it sounds like you mentioned some issues with iphonelocator combined with ping sensor being reliable. Perhaps I just misread something. Either way, I’d suggest playing around with the distance setting for the geofence in iViri. I too went the route of iphonelocator at one point, but there were a few things that were just too difficult to overcome so I actually have up on it. With iviri I’ve managed to get pretty consistent results now. I’ve got mine set to 250 meters and I get a notification my alarm has been disarmed about halfway down my street. Thinking on you’re garage door scenario, this would be about the distance needed to have your garage open by the time you get home.
Just my two cents.
@awake don’t give up on iViri just yet, v1.2 is in testing right now and should be released soon. It has a lot of hardening code around the geofence options and how it functions. Like @shmixx said, play around with your distance, it could just be something as simple as the fact that where you live there are potentially less Cell Phone Towers for it to accurately triangulate, this would be the case in a less populated area or in a country side vs. in the city, etc… If you get the distance setup correctly, as my wife and I have we pretty much no longer even use a mobile app to control our house as the automation that we have with geofencing option and the PLEG’s we have written, the house just reacts which I think is what everyone here is trying to accomplish. I am to the point and I have had other discussions with iViri users that are at this same point where a mobile app really isn’t of much use except for us to check on the house every once in awhile, nothing for control, because the house now reacts to our actions without us launching an app and physically interacting with our Vera. As for the difference between iViri and the iPhonelocator (not here to bash anyones setup or plugins as we are all here to achieve the same thing) iViri just relies on updates to your triangulation where as iPhoneLocator polls your physical GPS. So with that said yes iPhoneLocator is probably far more accurate on your physical location than iViri, however, with that accuracy comes battery drain which was the drawback for me causing me to write iViri. The other thing that was a draw back for me was to have it be extremely accurate you need it to poll often which I then would in turn get a lot of problem with exceeding the api quota. So with those 2 issues for me and my ability to write iOS code, I decided that I wanted to make your iPhone device an actual HA device, you spend $300+ for this device, way more than my Veralite cost me, why can’t we use its built in technologies to get control of the home.
Thanks for the feedback @awake, my only recommendation is to play with the distances and maybe wait for v1.2 to come out as I am sure you didn’t have your plugin working right out of the box, iViri may take some fine tuning when it comes to how you are setting up your radius.
Over the last month, I have managed to get a little more consistency. Geofence accuracy, is typically 1000 - 1500m which depends on the speed of the traffic. (I have to say 250m would be brilliant but totally unachievable here.). I have added a secondary Geofences at greater distances to the help when the switch fails to operate. Geofences periodically just stop working although they can be easily replaced.
I think you are at the mercy of your network providers too when it comes to reception / triangulation which is hard on the app developer, jpete.
I would probably pay again for a dedicated geofence app - if geofencing improves in iViri 1.2 
ETA?
[quote=“wj, post:47, topic:180186”]Over the last month, I have managed to get a little more consistency. Geofence accuracy, is typically 1000 - 1500m which depends on the speed of the traffic. (I have to say 250m would be brilliant but totally unachievable here.). I have added a secondary Geofences at greater distances to the help when the switch fails to operate. Geofences periodically just stop working although they can be easily replaced.
I think you are at the mercy of your network providers too when it comes to reception / triangulation which is hard on the app developer, jpete.
I would probably pay again for a dedicated geofence app - if geofencing improves in iViri 1.2 ETA?[/quote]
Geofencing will improve in v1.2 and I am looking at 2-3 weeks before submission to apple and then it will take the 4-7 days to approve it and get it updated on their servers. Things that have changed, multiple geofences are now reliable in the means that they stay on and don’t get triggered off, or delete or fail to turn on or just don’t stick in the app. Also it supports using a multiswitch or virtual switch and finally it doesn’t do the tap here for current location, you can just enter in an address, this way you can setup all of your geofences from the comfort of you own home and in advance to actually hitting a new geofence area. The app in general is way more stable in v1.2, took 10 seconds off of launch time unless you launch into voice control as your startup page, and also the crashes are gone, which is probably the most important thing about the release. I am working on camera support and UI 6 support will be in v2.0 release, not enough support from beta testers coming forward to help me out so I will have to wait until I just go to UI 6 on my own Vera. I have all of the API documentation but no one that has emailed me has reliably replied to an email so I am not going to dive into changing the code and instead get this v1.2 out the door so other users can get the benefits.
[quote=“shmixx, post:45, topic:180186”]@awake - so I’m confused at first it sounds like you mentioned some issues with iphonelocator combined with ping sensor being reliable. Perhaps I just misread something. Either way, I’d suggest playing around with the distance setting for the geofence in iViri. I too went the route of iphonelocator at one point, but there were a few things that were just too difficult to overcome so I actually have up on it. With iviri I’ve managed to get pretty consistent results now. I’ve got mine set to 250 meters and I get a notification my alarm has been disarmed about halfway down my street. Thinking on you’re garage door scenario, this would be about the distance needed to have your garage open by the time you get home.
Just my two cents.[/quote]
I was referring to the ping sensor being unreliable. The iphone locator gave consistent results within a <5 second window.
Given the results of my tests with Iviri so far, even if I was to extend my home’s geofence from 150m to 250m, this would not eliminate the problem of occasionally waiting for a door to open. And I already think 250m is too far; that’s 750 feet. So my original question still stands
“Given the constraints that Apple imposes, would it be possible to invoke a more frequent location update once a user is within a designated range of a geofence by beggining to manually poll a user’s location? Or by whatever other means necessary to achieve good responsiveness.”
Also, what is the current polling frequency using Iviri right now?
[quote=“awake33, post:49, topic:180186”]I was referring to the ping sensor being unreliable. The iphone locator gave consistent results within a <5 second window.
Given the results of my tests with Iviri so far, even if I was to extend my home’s geofence from 150m to 250m, this would not eliminate the problem of occasionally waiting for a door to open. And I already think 250m is too far; that’s 750 feet. So my original question still stands[/quote]
We used to just use GPS for this but realized that the battery drain was just as bad as what the iphone locator plugin caused so that is why we are using geofences.
We are attempting to use a technology that all iPhones are capable of using which is entering and exiting of regions that are monitored at all times. It would provide no better detection if we turned on the GPS to get your exact location once it detects if we are in or out of a monitored region. Basically Apple isn’t going to wake the application until it triggers an exit or enter of a region so if that is what we have to go off of at that time we might as well trigger something on the Vera instead of wake the GPS to get our exact location because at that time when it is trigger it would have already worked properly. I would like to add you to my beta testers so you can try out v1.2 to see if it yields any better results for you. If you are interested please email me your UDID at support@instruodev.com and please go to test flight and register your device with them.
iViri does not “Poll”. Apple offers a geofencing technology where you can tell your device to monitor for a specific region. Then you give your accuracy by specifying when to trigger based on that region, hence your radius that you specify. If you have used your reminders app that is on your device by apple to remind you of something when you are home or something along those lines that uses the same technology that iViri uses, we just monitor the region you setup and the Apple OS tells iViri when you have entered or exited that region based on the triangulation of cell phone towers. One thing I have noticed is if you have Wifi turned off, even if you are not connected to an access point it makes this triangulation highly inaccurate so make sure your wifi is on at all times even if you are not connected to an access point.
I understand Iviri doesn’t actively poll a service, I guess my question should have been referring to Apple’s service but I didn’t know what to call it. With PLEG and the Iphonelocator’s mute funtions I didn’t have an issue with battery drain.
My offer still stands for beta testing the latest v1.2 to see if we can improve your accuracy. Also if you could reply back and let me know if you keep your wifi connection turned on even when you are not attached to an access point that would be useful in potentially figuring out why your experience is less than desirable with the accuracy.
My offer still stands for beta testing the latest v1.2 to see if we can improve your accuracy. Also if you could reply back and let me know if you keep your wifi connection turned on even when you are not attached to an access point that would be useful in potentially figuring out why your experience is less than desirable with the accuracy.[/quote]
Yes, I leave my wifi on at all times.
My offer still stands for beta testing the latest v1.2 to see if we can improve your accuracy. Also if you could reply back and let me know if you keep your wifi connection turned on even when you are not attached to an access point that would be useful in potentially figuring out why your experience is less than desirable with the accuracy.[/quote]
Yes, I leave my wifi on at all times.[/quote]
So to my previous post, would you like to BETA test v1.2 and help make it better and hopefully improve your accuracy, or are you happy not using iViri and just using your iPhone Locator Plugin. Everyone that post on this board is here to make iViri better, we are here for a common cause and want to improve what most of us see as the direction the technology needs to go, however, I am starting to feel like your post have no intention of improving but rather just want to draw attention to the issues that you have, which I will add have not been the common response from users. Is your intention to make the app better or is it just to rag on it?
I have had excellent accuracy with my geofences (radius set to 50m). It’s mighty convenient to be turning the corner to my house and see the garage doors open up automatically. Well done!
The only issue I’ve seen is the geofences will eventually stop working. Subsequently launching the app will usually result in a “Network Error”, even if I’m on the same subnet as the Vera. Killing the app and restarting it always restores my geofence functionality though.
It sounds like this issue will be resolved in 1.2 though. Thanks!
[quote=“NewfD90, post:55, topic:180186”]I have had excellent accuracy with my geofences (radius set to 50m). It’s mighty convenient to be turning the corner to my house and see the garage doors open up automatically. Well done!
The only issue I’ve seen is the geofences will eventually stop working. Subsequently launching the app will usually result in a “Network Error”, even if I’m on the same subnet as the Vera. Killing the app and restarting it always restores my geofence functionality though.
It sounds like this issue will be resolved in 1.2 though. Thanks![/quote]
Its always nice to hear success stories, it is what keeps me going and developing on this idea of making your expensive iDevice a HA device itself. Yea v1.2 should resolve that, if you would like to BETA test it please send me your UDID and register with test flight and I will have a new BETA out tomorrow to test to see if it resolves your issues.
I would be glad to help. PM sent.
Unfortunately I am on T-Mobile; would probably fair better if I was still on AT&T.
The Test Flight app says I’ll receive an email when an app build is available. I’m still waiting ;D
Same here; works great at my house!
[quote=“awake33, post:58, topic:180186”]Unfortunately I am on T-Mobile; would probably fair better if I was still on AT&T.
The Test Flight app says I’ll receive an email when an app build is available. I’m still waiting ;D[/quote]
I hope you got the email from testflight, it has been uploaded for you to begin testing.