I have a HomeKit garage door opener from Insignia that I bought on Black Friday sale last year. It had a lot of problems at first and bricked itself, but the newer device with the newer firmware seems to be running okay now. But I'm wondering—is it possible for a geofence to incorrectly detect whether you're entering or leaving your home?
A little over a month ago I was reading on Reddit and maybe on here too about how you can get around Apple's limitations on HomeKit geofencing being unable to open doors. Basically you buy another switch, such as a WeMo, and hide that switch away somewhere in your house where people aren't going to press it. It's basically a bypass switch, so I bought an extra immediately. Then you set it to turn on when you get within range of your house, then set another automation up to open your garage door when the WeMo is triggered, and then at the end of the automation you turn off the WeMo. Boom, automatic garage door opener. I didn't set up automatic closing, because I feared my wife leaving while I'm working in the garage with lawn equipment out or the trunk up on my Outback and making a mess of things.
So for the first couple weeks things worked great. It would open when I would get a few doors down from my house. Nice. Completely unnecessary, but nice and felt futuristic. But then I started having problems. It started not opening sometimes automatically. Then it started never opening automatically. This went on for a couple weeks until the other day, when it opened automatically. Then this morning, I backed out and closed the garage door. I remember making sure it closed because there was a car turning around in our cul-de-sac that I didn't recognize and wanted to make sure it closed in case someone was scoping out houses (yeah, I'm mildly paranoid, it sucks). So I take a couple turns to get out of my neighborhood onto the main road and see a notification pop up that my garage door opened. I thought it was kinda weird but thought maybe the notification was lagging, which I've seen happen before. The status wouldn't update to show whether or not the garage door was open or closed, it was just stuck on "opening".
So I get to work and on my iMac Pro a notification popped up that my garage door had opened and there was nothing saying it closed. Weird. Then I saw a notification it closed, and immediately got a text from my wife that she was putting out the trash from our daycare and noticed the garage door was open and closed it. It had somehow opened itself! So is it possible for a geofence to incorrectly detect whether I'm entering or leaving it? I take an L-shaped route away from my house. Is it possible that I barely go outside the circle, and then back into the circle for a moment when leaving my neighborhood? Does anyone know the geofence radius for Home? You can set a custom one if you pick something other than Home, but then it said the automation wouldn't work with family member's devices, but I suppose I could set it up for my wife separately. Do you guys think if I made a bigger custom circle size, I would be less likely to cross in and out of the circle, if that's the issue? Or am I playing with fire by trying to automate this in this way? Thanks for the help.
A little over a month ago I was reading on Reddit and maybe on here too about how you can get around Apple's limitations on HomeKit geofencing being unable to open doors. Basically you buy another switch, such as a WeMo, and hide that switch away somewhere in your house where people aren't going to press it. It's basically a bypass switch, so I bought an extra immediately. Then you set it to turn on when you get within range of your house, then set another automation up to open your garage door when the WeMo is triggered, and then at the end of the automation you turn off the WeMo. Boom, automatic garage door opener. I didn't set up automatic closing, because I feared my wife leaving while I'm working in the garage with lawn equipment out or the trunk up on my Outback and making a mess of things.
So for the first couple weeks things worked great. It would open when I would get a few doors down from my house. Nice. Completely unnecessary, but nice and felt futuristic. But then I started having problems. It started not opening sometimes automatically. Then it started never opening automatically. This went on for a couple weeks until the other day, when it opened automatically. Then this morning, I backed out and closed the garage door. I remember making sure it closed because there was a car turning around in our cul-de-sac that I didn't recognize and wanted to make sure it closed in case someone was scoping out houses (yeah, I'm mildly paranoid, it sucks). So I take a couple turns to get out of my neighborhood onto the main road and see a notification pop up that my garage door opened. I thought it was kinda weird but thought maybe the notification was lagging, which I've seen happen before. The status wouldn't update to show whether or not the garage door was open or closed, it was just stuck on "opening".
So I get to work and on my iMac Pro a notification popped up that my garage door had opened and there was nothing saying it closed. Weird. Then I saw a notification it closed, and immediately got a text from my wife that she was putting out the trash from our daycare and noticed the garage door was open and closed it. It had somehow opened itself! So is it possible for a geofence to incorrectly detect whether I'm entering or leaving it? I take an L-shaped route away from my house. Is it possible that I barely go outside the circle, and then back into the circle for a moment when leaving my neighborhood? Does anyone know the geofence radius for Home? You can set a custom one if you pick something other than Home, but then it said the automation wouldn't work with family member's devices, but I suppose I could set it up for my wife separately. Do you guys think if I made a bigger custom circle size, I would be less likely to cross in and out of the circle, if that's the issue? Or am I playing with fire by trying to automate this in this way? Thanks for the help.