Using WIFI

[Aussie Mate]

Just wondering if you have plans to implement the use of WiFi to indentfy people?
Given that most people have wifi turned on all the time on their cell phones rather than bluetooth - this would be a great addition for your plugin.

[Emotion]

Yep, WiFi has advantages simply because it's easier to get people to use your WiFi network rather than do the Bluetooth thing if only because they want to check their Facebook on their phone!

Imagine your WiFi router dishing out IP addresses to new devices - the first problem to face is how to is Emotion running on the HomeSeer PC going to know about a new device? You could do a periodic ping of all IP's in your local subnet to detect new devices. Although this works, we found that both Apple and Android devices don't always respond, together with some WiFi routers insisting on dishing out different IP addresses to the same device on reconnects, even though their MAC addresses don't change and DHCP lease times set large.

We've found a solution using WebSocket protocol RFC6455 to obtain the client IP address and then using Ping/Arp to get the client MAC address. The MAC address is key, since the IP address may change and the MAC not only contains vendor information as the first part of the address (so you can work out whether it's a phone or something else like a printer), but also because we've found that WOL (wake-up-on-LAN) actually does work on a WiFi connection on a phone to take it out of sleep to perform proximity detection (you don't need to know the IP for a WOL broadcast, just the MAC).

However, we found that the above method works for IOS and Android 4+ but not on Windows Mobile, so Emotion v3 uses a combination of WiFi and Bluetooth for reliable detection depending on phone type.