Holiday mode by ping phones.

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I’m on vacation now, and in pimatic i have a vacation switch so when we are not home the lights won’t turn on when its getting dark.

I can use ping to check all our phones at home, but the problem is that every one here has a iphone, so pinging is only possible when some1 is using their phone.

I thought something like this:

if no phone was available between 07:00 and sunset then switch to vacation mode. But i have no idea how i could check if no phone was available between a certain time.

Solved, thanks to @georg90:

Install pimatic-ping.

add all your phones to the config:

{
  "id": "my-phone",
  "name": "my smartphone",
  "class": "PingPresence",
  "host": "192.168.1.4",
  "interval": 10000
}

Create a variable called $home

Add this rule to change $home to false if everybody is gone:

IF my-phone is absent for 15 minutes and $home is "true" THEN set $home to "false"

To set $home to true if someone is home:

IF [your-phone is present] and $home is not "true" THEN set $home to "true"

Now you can use $home in other rules to do something when someone is home or not. like:

IF $home = "true" and its 18:00 THEN turn lights on

If your using an iphone you have to wake it because the wifi of the iphone goes to sleep when its inactive.

First install hping: sudo apt-get install hping3

Then add this rule to wake the iphones every 5 minutes:

IF every 5 minutes THEN execute "sudo hping3 -2 -c 3 -p 5353 192.168.1.4 >/dev/null 2>&1 || true"

Change the ip to your phone’s ip address. Make sure you have added you phone to the ip address reservation list on your router.

You could write a shell script that simply writes 0 or 1 into a file, depending on whether one of your iPhones was pingable or not. After that, just install a cronjob that runs every half hour or so between 7am and sunset.
Then you would need a second script which “resets” your file every midnight - shouldn’t be too difficult to write either. Afterwards, install a cronjob for that script as well.

I would then add a ShellSensor, which reads your status file. You can then use this Sensor for your rule in order to determine, whether you’re in vacation mode or not.

If I do this:

New variable in pimatic: $home

rule1:

If its 7:00 then $home = "false"

rule2:

if $home = "false" and its after 7:00 and [phone1 is present or phone2 is present] then $home = "true"

Rule3:

If its 30 minutes before sunset and $home = "true" then turn light1 on and turn light2 on etc...

This should work?

About the iphone and it going to sleep I found a simple solution:

hping3 will wake up the iphone for ~10-20sec and then ping will detect that it’s still there.
Working great here. So then you’ll only have to test against the $ping variable.

Yeah great name indeed

The rule is not waking up the phone every 10-20sec - it’s only waking it up every 10 min for ~10-20sec…never noticed any less battery because of that - also you can adjust this value…so maybe wake it up every 30min and check if it’s still there? If it’s only to see if somebody is there around the day - once and hour or even more should be just fine…

ah, short question: if i click on the blue dots/circles i see "Presence: absent @ 15:24:20"
That should be the time where the state changed the last time, if im right.
So why don’t you use this to see if somebody was there around the day?

@thymian Is that possible to do something with the date/time from the present? I don’t know how.

@georg90 said:

About the iphone and it going to sleep I found a simple solution:

hping3 will wake up the iphone for ~10-20sec and then ping will detect that it’s still there.
Working great here. So then you’ll only have to test against the $ping variable.

Thanks, i will try that

@georg90 said:

About the iphone and it going to sleep I found a simple solution:

hping3 will wake up the iphone for ~10-20sec and then ping will detect that it’s still there.
Working great here. So then you’ll only have to test against the $ping variable.

What interval do you use in pimatic-ping device?

And everytime when pimatic executes "sudo hping3 -2 -c 3 -p 5353 192.168.1.4 >/dev/null 2>&1 || true" i get: error [pimatic]: Cannot read property '1' of null

Edit: Now i get no error anymore, don’t know why. But it looks like hping is not waking the iphones? If i do an ip scan i can see the iphone but i can’t ping after sending a hping.

Edit2: Looks like its working now Thanks

great it’s working You’ll sometimes get an error back from hping3 but it’s actually waking the phone…so you can just ignore that (... || true)

For the interval you can check my rules, I wake the phone every 10min, and if there is no response from the phone for 30min, I set $ping to 0

maybe you can write a short instruction how to get this to work?

@Sjeff This is my version (pimatic knows if your gone after 15 minutes)

Install pimatic-ping.

add all your phones to the config:

{
  "id": "my-phone",
  "name": "my smartphone",
  "class": "PingPresence",
  "host": "192.168.1.4",
  "interval": 10000
}

Create a variable called $home

Add this rule to change $home to false if everybody is gone:

IF my-phone is absent for 15 minutes and $home is "true" THEN set $home to "false"

To set $home to true if someone is home:

IF [your-phone is present] and $home is not "true" THEN set $home to "true"

Now you can use $home in other rules to do something when someone is home or not. like:

IF $home = "true" and its 18:00 THEN turn lights on

If your using an iphone you have to wake it because the wifi of the iphone goes to sleep when its inactive.

First install hping: sudo apt-get install hping3

Then add this rule to wake the iphones every 5 minutes:

IF every 5 minutes THEN execute "sudo hping3 -2 -c 3 -p 5353 192.168.1.4 >/dev/null 2>&1 || true"

Change the ip to your phone’s ip address. Make sure you have added you phone to the ip address reservation list on your router.

@sweebee Thanks i will try this tonight

@sweebee short question about your little howto:
you wake up your phone(s) every 5 minutes and you ping your phones every 10 seconds.
How long will iOS devices stay “pingable” if you waked it up with hping3? Long enough for that 10 seconds?

I don’t know how long it will be pingable, but 10 seconds is fast enough.

@sweebee Got it working! looks like i was home all night

Great, now you know you didn’t sleepwalk

Hello

I am trying to use this iPhone “hack” to wake up my wifes phone every 5 minutes.
But I get following error from pimatic (hping works if i do it directly from shell)

Could not parse rule “if every 5 minutes then execute “sudo hping3 -2 -c 3 -p 5353 192.168.1.116 >/dev/null 2>&1 || true””: Could not find an provider that provides the next action of “execute “sudo hping3 -2 -c 3 -p 5353 192.168.1.116 >/dev/null 2>&1 || true””.

Any ideas?