Phone status on home network issuea

[m19brandon]

Has anyone had any luck with monitoring what phones are connected to their home network? I have been using pings for years but with ios 10 and Android 7, I have had to up the time to 5 minutes before marking that phone as dead and I am still having issue with it being marked dead and the reconnecting minutes later.

Any thoughs on other methods. The goal is to know who is home and when they enter and leave.

[yokel22]

If your using an android phone. I use tasker to monitor my wifi connection. When it connects to my home network i send a get request to the webserver plugin(http://serverip:port?MyPhoneConnected). & another request when the phone disconnects(http://serverip:port?MyPhoneDisConnected). Those events set a persistent variable with the webserver plugin to track each phone's state. I get good response times this way, usually 30 secs, when i hit the boundries of my network. Only caveat is this may eat your battery quicker.

[m19brandon]

Let me play around with that. Already have a home profile in Tasker, just need to add a task or two to it. Thanks for the input.

[kgschlosser]

make sure the phone is not shutting off the wifi when it goes to sleep. I have found that this will cause issues.

i have not had any experience with tasker but it seems like a whole lot to have running all the time slowing the device down chewing up resources and battery life for the sole purpose of letting EG know when the phone is connected to your wifi...

these are android apps
have a look see at FIND. this is specific to wifi and location awareness...
but you also have EGIGeoZone which is geofencing and has a plugin made for it so it can send data to EG via the network receiver or TCP events plugin..

the combination of both pretty much covers everything

my system knows when i am 3000 meters away and turns the heat up. and at 1000 meters will shutdown anything i may have left on (when exiting the fenced area) and at 50 meters it will turn on the lights in and outside my home. based on the time of day. and if my wife is home.. if the wife is home it will only turn on the outside lights. and when leaving if the wife is home it will only turn off the outside lights. but if any of the TV's are on and nothing is playing. it will turn them off. (wife home or not) and if she isn't home it will turn the heat down shut the lights off. turn off the fireplaces. and pause a movie if playing and shutdown all the audio and video in the house and lastly turn on timer that turns lights on and off at random time intervals random devices and random levels (bugler deterrent).

I have just really started messing around with FIND. where i live doesn't have a whole lot of different wifi signals to get a reference for position. so I have been adding an ESP8266 to various locations in the home set up as an access point for FIND to get signal levels from. but that will allow for non motion detecting turning on and off of lights, TV's. having the morning alarm clock go off in whatever room it is that i fell asleep in (that's a nice feature). But i will also use it to locate where i left my phone.. LOL

and one of the best features of EGIGeoZone is you can set it up to turn off the wifi on your phone when you leave you house... to save power. which will cause the FIND app to go into an idle state. which gives me an idea. maybe i can get the dev of FIND to code somehting up so that you will have the option to turn On or Off the GPS when the wifi turns on or off and it is in a location that has been learned,

[kgschlosser]

I just sent over a request to the dev of FIND for an option like that. would be a great thing for battery saving..

[yokel22]

"kgschlosser, give tasker a try. It's basically EG for your phone. You can write your own plugins for it also. The battery & resource drain are pretty minimal. I monitor a slew of things & don't have any issue getting a full day on my note 7.

[kgschlosser]

holy cow samsung is up to 7 now...


I owned the first phablet. and No one knows what it was... Do you??

Have you heard of OnePlus? that's what i have... a OnePlus 2. I couldn't believe the memory usage the last time i got a samsung note.. of the available 3 gigs of ram all 3 gigs were used.. and the phone was slower then hell... Then they went and did a force update on android that you couldn't tell it no to... and that update caused my battery to die in about 4 hours. That was it I had enough... so I got the OnePlus. snapgragon 810 (first phone with it i believe) 4 gigs ram and 64 gig internal. dial sim every spec had beaten what samsungs next Note phone was going to be when i bought the thing except the screen is 1080. but i really don't se the need to have that super high resolution or something the size of a photo.

the best thing is it was 300 USD bought, paid for, owned, No contracts. No one going in and forcing updates on me.. I can root it if i want. doesn't matter. NO BLOAT WARE. that is the best part.. uses less then a gig of memory out of boot.

and the company is able to sell them this cheap because they do not advertise. it's all word of mouth. there was a 5 million person waiting list for this phone..

[yokel22]

I've heard of the OnePlus just haven't seen one in person. Samsung's phones are terribly inefficient, but so are most android devices. I've had other samsung devices that lagged and did odd things. I have no complaints on my Note 7 though, it is the nicest phone i've owned(including several iphones and flagship androids). Apart from the possibility of spontaneous combustion, i highly recommend them.

[kgschlosser]

LOL reah I agree... I had all kinds of issues with mine.. one of the most annoying was a grid of black pixels.. Now i thought they were dead pixels.. fuyy thing tho... if i did a screen shot and sent it off in an e-mail to say my home pc... they were in the screen shot as well... when my carrier did a remote session they would not show... and when they did a screen shot.. they would show in it.. the technical reason for it was "It's just the way it is" and when i asked for a replacement "We only warranty the hardware not the software".

and when they did a push of the new OS to my phone and I was working on something important.. and the message came up to upgrade and i said no.. and it went and did it anyway without informing me that is was and just rebooted the phone causing me to lose everything i was working on. that was it. I had it with mainstream phones and being latched to a carrier.. I have 7 lines. and not a single one of them is in contract.. and it is amazing how fast they do things for you when you aren't under contract and you let them know that..

they changes something around. and I was getting signal at my house. And they it was intermittent.. so I found out Cisco makes a microcell (kinda like a miniaturized cell tower. and my carrier supported it.. so i called them and asked about it.. it turned out they sold em.. 400 USD.. i choked on that price stated to them "So let me get this right... you want me to buy something. Pay for electric for it.. Pay for the High Speed Data it needs. In order to pay you??? And do you think that I am actually dumb enough to do this???." and then i said "I will take my 7 not under contract lines and go somewhere else!".. person on the phone said.. well let me send an e-mail and see what kind of things we might be able to do. I will call you when i hear back..". 2 days... 2 days later.. and UPS showed up at my door with a package. i received one of these things free of charge. I had never gotten a call back. It just showed up and i get a 20 dollar a month credit on my bill for the electric and HSD use. I have never gotten any cell company to move that fast for anything. Tho i have been with this same company for hell probably close to 15 years. well not really.. I think 10 because the original company got bought out. and I was with the original for 5 or so 15 years.

But i have had to do things with other companies for other people and businesses.. and it's like pullin teeth to get them to do something. they cringe at that not under contract thing. because there is no legal obligation to stay with them. Ya have to be in good standing with them as well. in 15 years i have never had 1 late payment.

It's funny when the phone goes all silent when you tell them that tho.. You know they are trying to think of something to say. LOL.

it's just like dealing with a cable company. if you have an issue. never talk to the jamoke that answers the phone. ask for the "Customer Loyalty Department". every cable company has that department. it may be named differently but are tasked with the same job.. Keep the customer... they are the ones with all the keys to all the magic buttons to get things done. It's amazing how they will fix your bill... make it cheaper for you every month and give you all kinds of free upgrades. when the last person you spoke to said "There is nothing we can do"

I have been keeping track of this crap over the years.

Cell phone companies never want to lower your bill.. so unless you ask them every time you have to call "How can you save me money" they won't just come out and offer. So I make it a habit to call every 4 months or so when i pay the bill (i will do it over the phone when i call) just to ask. and I have managed to wiggle my way into some kind of price point where i get 50 gigs of data with roll over data, Unlimited talk/Text. International plan. for 7 lines at 230 USD a month. that's all things accounted for.. the 20 in credit and all taxes and fees.. that is the bill.

Ya have to be diligent. It's a pain. and sometimes just hanging up the phone and calling back so you get someone with a brain on the other end is the method you need to take.. took me 12 times once of calling just to get someone that spoke "complete" English without sounding like they had a mouth full of marbles.

[kgschlosser]

sorry my informative rant...

I know tasker is like EG for the phone. I don't have the patience to do all that kind of work on something with a 5 inch screen. I do have an OTG cable and can hook up a keyboard and mouse. so that would help things out. but I have never found anything that works to allow an RDP session to the phone. tho it has been a while since I have tried it.

[m19brandon]

I have oneplus one and now three.

I found EG because of Tasker and AutoApps.

AutoApps has a geofacing app that I already own. I will make the switch this weekend. My phone is set to always stay connected under wifi but it still goes to sleep.

[kgschlosser]

yeah the issue with WiFi is it has inherently way to many disconnects and reconnects..

now you will also have an issue with the GPS if the developer of Tasker did not code in the use of the GPS data.. this is a known mistake for developers.. there is some kind of an odd means to specifically query the GPS.. querying google location services API will always grab the location data from the cell provider.. which determines your location based on cell tower overlap. and can cause location jumping based on your position in that overlap.

it does this to save battery life. because GPS does use a HUGE amount of the battery. just because the user has "High Accuracy" turned on does not mean that an android service querying for a location will use the GPS. it still ends up getting the information from the cell provider.

so you may have to implement some kind of a smoothing on the EG side of things as an example. set a Timer to run a macro (say a minute) if receiving an exiting event only if there is no entering Timer running. and if there is to end the timer and do nothing. and if an entering event occurs and there is no exiting timer to Set a Timer to run the macro. otherwise kill the Exiting timer and do nothing. this way it will handle any crap like this..

But your issue of 5 minutes is way to long otherwise I would have suggested this to you to smooth out any random disconnects