Domoticz

Yes, I would like to announce to my house that I have arrived. Not with an axe however, but by some z-wave means.

The original Fibaro idea (that never materialized) was to flash your car lights on arrival and you home would spring to life and welcome you.

To begin, I just want to turn on a couple of lights when my car comes up the drive, but NOT the postman or people delivering religious pamphlets so obviously a simple PIR/Motion sensor is a non starter.

I've tried geofencing but it is so unreliable that it's a joke.

How would you guys solve this problem?

Thanks in advance,
Sean

I do use geofence for that and it works brilliantly.
I use tasker with autolocation and have set 2 geofences for 1 location. One with a small diameter for entering this geofence and the other with a larger diameter for when I leave this location. In this case I don't get falsely registered away from home when my phone is switching cell towers while I'm home.
Another way is to use Presence detection by Chopper_Rob but this has its limitations when you'd also want it to switch off certain lights/devices when the phone is not connected but still home (phone switched off due to battery or losing wifi connection when screen goes off/device goes into deep sleep). You'll also have to have wifi reception on the spot where you'd want to be "detected"

For me it's geofence which works best!

I am using the presence detection script checking both bluetooth and IP (Wifi) for the presence of our phones.
This works quite well. running 2 instances in crontab, one for each phone I want to check. They each set the status of a dummy/virtual switch, which then is used a the base for all kinds of actions in case we're gone or come home.
Started with just WiFI/IP: https://www.domoticz.com/wiki/Presence_detection and added an bluetooth check option to it based on this post: http://www.domoticz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5214
It now first does the bluetooth ping and when that fails the ip ping to double check.

Jos

Ah, the idea of the 2 diameter Geofence zones is brilliant! Our Geofence always triggers when we get home, but is unreliable, or appears to "wander" a bit when we are in the house. Going to try and set this up using Domoticz Android App this weekend. At the moment we use a combination of Geofence and Ping, but the new Marshmallow OS sleeps the phones making this unreliable by itself. With the suggested method above and Ping method combined this should prove reliable. We will see.

Hmmm... maybe I should explain further.

Wifi is a big issue as I have 4 wifi points in my house due to physical size and some of the internal walls are over 750mm thick. The wall between my kitchen and hall completely blocks a wifi signal. Therefore I'm flipping between wifi points as I walk through the house.

Within the house my gps and phone signal becomes very patchy so for those reasons I'd prefer a more physical method of switching. I've come home and sat down and Domoticz thinks I've just left again. If my outside lighting was reliant on geofencing I'd be sending morse code messages to the moon

That said,
Many thanks for the replies so far. maybe a combo of dual fence + bluetooth + wifi will do the trick. I'll read up on it

Sean