Geofence

[doinitsideways]

Hi,

I have three Vera users. My main account and one user for my wife and another user for my wall mounted ipad in the kitchen.

My issue is getting Vera to switch over to away mode. I have my and my wifes geofence zones setup and the tickboxes turned on for enable geofence and also the set to home when 1 home and set to away when nobody is home. The third wall mounted app is set to NOT enable geofencing. But does that mean it is Always reporting as home and not allowing the modes to change when my wife and i both leave the home fence??

Cheers,
Josh

[owend]

I am also having the problem of VeraPlus not setting Away or Home with geofence.
I updated to the latest firmware and IOS app today and it is still not working.  I have had a ticket open for 8 months with support and was told I am one of the very few that is is not working for.  I have only been told to wait for the next update and it may work for me. 
Is this working for everyone like support says?
If not, what are other people doing to get geofence to work?  Does anyone have geofence working to set Home and Away?
Thanks for any information you can provide.

[Don Phillips]

Never had any consistent performance with geofencing so I have been using iPhone Locator for many years.

[Inzax]

I am also having the problem of VeraPlus not setting Away or Home with geofence.
I updated to the latest firmware and IOS app today and it is still not working.  I have had a ticket open for 8 months with support and was told I am one of the very few that is is not working for.  I have only been told to wait for the next update and it may work for me. 
Is this working for everyone like support says?
If not, what are other people doing to get geofence to work?  Does anyone have geofence working to set Home and Away?
Thanks for any information you can provide.

My geofence was working very well for an extended period of time.  Wife is on a Samsung G6.  I was on an android Motorola Maxx.  No issues.  I switched to a Samsung G7 and the bottom fell out.  Spent two months tweaking obscure settings.  (setting vera to unmanaged in battery interface, disabling do not disturb, etc...)  I also got the "wow...you are the only one its not working for" response.  In the end, it seemed like the samsung shut down the app in a day regardless of settings dictating otherwise. 

After two months my samsung bricked.  Replacement GS7 has NO issues leading me to believe my original phone was just bad from the start.

On my old crappy phone I did have a brief period of success before it died.  I downloaded the beta version of the app.  This seemed to work reliably. 

[owend]

Never had any consistent performance with geofencing so I have been using iPhone Locator for many years.

Can you tell me what iPhone locator is?  Is it hard to set up and use for geofence?
Thanks

[kartcon]

If you need to Geofence, the I-Phone locator app is the way to go. We are using it as a trigger for a custom built alarm system in conjunction with the Ping Sensor app and the I-phone locator is far more reliable. Install the app, configure your I-cloud information, select the device and set a radius. Thats all you really need to get started. There area a few minor adjustments you can make to tweak the performance, but they are well documented if you search for them.
One caveat I can report after hurricane Irma; since the I-phone app needs to access your I-cloud account, you will NOT have any Geofence capabilities in the absence of an internet connection. We were offline for 3.5 days and during that time we were unable to use geofencing as a means to detect our presence or absence from home. Additionally since we were without power for 36 hours, my Vera Secure was completely confused as to the correct local time and would put the house in NITE mode in the middle of the day. I even tried to get Vera to connect via my phones wifi hotspot but could not get the clock to re-synch. Once the internet came back online everything resynchronized and all was well again.

[Don Phillips]

Never had any consistent performance with geofencing so I have been using iPhone Locator for many years.

Can you tell me what iPhone locator is?  Is it hard to set up and use for geofence?
Thanks

It is a plugin you install within Vera. Real easy to set up.

[doinitsideways]

Never had any consistent performance with geofencing so I have been using iPhone Locator for many years.

Can you tell me what iPhone locator is?  Is it hard to set up and use for geofence?
Thanks

It is a plugin you install within Vera. Real easy to set up.

Hi Don,

As always, thanks for your insight.

One question though is my wife and i use different itunes/icloud accounts... how do i go about adding her phone?

Also, just so i am clear, the geofence sets the VeraEdge state yeah? So i i leave the house but my wife is still there, my vera app (veramate et al) will show Home as her phone is still there... or will it show Away as i and my account are away??



Josh

[Don Phillips]

You create 2 iPhone Locator devices, and each device is set to the each iCloud account, with the coordinates of home.  I use Multiswitch and Virtual Switches to track who is home, or you can use PLEG as well.

Here are some more screen shots for setting up the devices.  If you need further help, let me know:
 

[sebby]

You create 2 iPhone Locator devices, and each device is set to the each iCloud account, with the coordinates of home.  I use Multiswitch and Virtual Switches to track who is home, or you can use PLEG as well.

Here are some more screen shots for setting up the devices.  If you need further help, let me know:

+1 on what Don is doing...  i use some lua code to set the house mode depending on where the phones are.

[Priest]

I have an android and my wife has an iPhone 7S. We both are using just the plain old geofencing in the vera app and it works great.  This last sunday was the only time in 9 months that I got a false reading from it.  I left and my wife was taking a nap, her phone was plugged in next to the bed and mine was on me.  An hour later I got a hit from Vera saying that motion was detected in the hall.  Vera had gone to Away while she was home.  That is the only time it has done it though.

[dJOS]

After only a few days use I've stopped using Vera Geofences on iOS to trigger my Home / Away functionality, it was easy enough to implement but just horribly unreliable!

I've gone back to Nest geo-fencing and using it to trigger Home/Away for Vera instead as it's 100% reliable!

This is a bit disappointing as I was hoping to use our Vera Plus to log our comings and goings just in-case we ever have a break-in and need to prove we weren't home (this actually happened to us a few years ago as there was no sign of forced entry).

[Sjoerd]

I started testing the geofence using the native iPhone app.
It seems to be working OK as long as the app is used once a day.
So it looks like the geofence stops reporting in background if not used for a certian period.

Any suggestions?
Will also open a ticket so support is aware like topic starter was asking