I'm trying to leverage an app "Owntracks" Full documentation at https://owntracks.org/booklet/guide/topics/
Background: Life360 is not reliable. FFM is now limited by apple's family size. This looks like a great alternative for presence, location tracking, etc and looks to be a lot more secure and was built for tinkerers like us.
1) Set up MQTT Broker Plugin
2) Set up MQTT Connector Plugin
3) Set up MQTT Shims Plugin
So far I have it working at about 80% while I'm in the house.
I set up a generic shim device (My phone) that is getting all these cool states from the app: battery level, lattitude, longitude, timestamp, in regions (what geofence I'm in) etc.
Problem 1: Lattitude and longitude are getting pulled in as a real number (rounded two past the decimal). I kinda need the whole thing for this to be useful.
Problem 2: Security. Right now this is cool on my network using my indigo machine IP address. But I'll need to switch that to the reflector and then? Password? API key? and then figure out how to put that in the app so they keep talking to each other.
Problem 3: 2-way communication? I can repeat these steps for other phones in the house, but I think they are suposed to be able to share with each other using the Broker as the communication hub?
I was trying to wrap my head around the templates to see if maybe I could write a new one to define all the states that corespond with the app.... but I think more states will show up when I start entering and leaving and stuff.
Any pointers would be great. I can post screen shots or try to explain stuff better. Honestly, I'm suprised it worked at all given my lack of MQTT knowledge.
Edit 1/15: Finally got an external MQTT broker running on a spare raspberry pi3b. (Side note, that 3b has dramatically gone up in value since I purchased it for $34).
With the MQTT Connector and MQTT Shims, I was able to create a device for each cell phone running the Owntracks app. I was also able to use the ghostxml plugin to pull historical data from the "recorder" part of the app that lives on the raspberry pi. It's not pretty, but I just made that happen earler today.
With the MQTT broker running solid, I'm trying a different approach. There is a Home Assistant image available on the Raspberry Pi Imager app (MacOS). So far so good. A few clicks here and there, no terminal and I have Home Assistant running with Mosquito Broker. Why this route? It might offer other integration options for presence detection, I need a broker anyway and I may need to control stuff on site that is out of range from my indigo network. I'll tinker with this for a day or so to decide if it's worth keeping or not.