What are you using for GeoFencing / Tracking on Android Phones?

[Ltek]

Curious what everyone is using that works well on Android and with Homeseer and/or PHLocation?
Geofencing is most important to me to know for automation when coming/leaving and for key locations like school, work, etc.

For many years I've been using EgiGeoZone on my Android devices. Geofencing works great most of the time, but it will occasionally go silent and need a nudge (clear all fences). A bit annoying but not horrible. Location tracking is not very good, but its not a priority for me.

thx for the input

[Kevb]

HSBuddy, been working great for me for years. Also does notifications, dashboards, etc.

[bla8291]

I'm using HSBuddy. I had previously been using Tasker + AutoLocation, and then sending the information to HS. It started getting unreliable, and also I prefer to give control to the server for that kind of monitoring, rather than my phone.

HSBuddy has not missed a beat in the few months that I've been using it. It has the ability to add multiple geofences, and can show the current location.

[Ltek]

Tried HSbuddy on one phone so far seems to work well.

Are you guys using PHLocation at all now?

[Kevb]

I've only used HSBuddy. I made a virtual device for each client with a status for each geofence plus away. Works great.

[Ltek]

I've only used HSBuddy. I made a virtual device for each client with a status for each geofence plus away. Works great.

What are you using the pull data and update the vDevices?

[randy]

I use HSBuddy Triggers for arrival and departure of fences. I also have Virtual Devices controlled by entry/exit.

[Kevb]

I have nearly identical events, setting location on the appropriate virtual device. Other events trigger off the status of the virtual devices (i.e., virtual device Home is occupied or unoccupied, different lights or announcements depending on who arrives first, etc.)

[will40]

I go a step further for tracking and scrape HSBuddy's DB for clients' GPS coordinates and using some 'convoluted' scripting to push the results to HS devices and eventually to PHLocation. It is a round and round and round about temporary solution until Avargaskun adds the feature.

[Ltek]

I have separate vDevices for each tracked person (via phone) and have individual 'occupancy' tracking Events for a combo of Pings (BLLAN), WiFi Router associations (Jon00 SysLog) and GeoFencing (HSbuddy; previously PHLocation2) ... this ensures some redundancy in case something fails.

I was curious if people has an easy way (script) updated vDevices with location data (addresses or Log/Lat). Thinking I could use SDJ-Health Log Monitor to do it if HSBuddy writes that info to the HS log.

I go a step further for tracking and scrape HSBuddy's DB for clients' GPS coordinates and using some 'convoluted' scripting to push the results to HS devices and eventually to PHLocation. It is a round and round and round about temporary solution until Avargaskun adds the feature.

Yup, I'm hoping he adds it soon!

[will40]

I was inspired by wallee comment to use the log monitor and it worked great but I soon noticed how my HS log was filling fast. I try not to see anything in logs but issues.

With the huge help from jon00 working on a similar scraping script and educating myself a little on sqlite I was able to query HSBuddy database for the client coordinates. From there I was able to assign the variables to HS devices based on triggering on database updates (again thanks to Jon00 file monitor!)

So a lot of moving parts and not for the faint hearted but I enjoyed the cobbling and watching it work which this is all about!

Avargaskun will get to it at some point but feel free to reach out if you want to try and I will gladly share from what I got from this great Homeseer community.