Ever since the unofficial Life360 plugin for Homeassistant started to act spotty (API changes related to Cloudfare all the time that were no longer fun to try to keep up with) I have been looking for an alternative.
Luckily the only thing I need to know is whether 1 or more person is home vs not_home. This I determine with a probably way too complex Node-RED if-this-then-that type of flow. As Homeassistant has this built-in it was actually quite easy to setup. There are a couple other services out there as well, but for some reason I trust Homeassistant more (than Life360, for sure) when it comes to sharing my data with a 3rd party…
Steps to take:
- Remove all device_tracker related plugins first.
- Install the Homeassistant app on your iOS/Android device and setup it to allow Location Permission to
Always. Set Location Accuracy toFulland Background Refresh toEnabled. - For the
homevsnot_homelogic you can use the device_tracker or check whether the device is connected to the wifi-network with the ssid sensor - Update the Node-RED to make sure to use the proper Entity ID, e.g.
device_tracker.iphone_van_marcella_15_pro
UPDATE: I have been using this method for a couple months now and have had zero issues. I can’t believe I wasted all this time trying to fix the Life360 plugin… This works straight out of the box if you need simple device tracking & location detection.