I am trying to come up with an effective way to determine when our house is occupied, besides motion detectors/occupancy sensors, and I thought I had it figured out with the script that locates our iPhones. It was working perfectly, except my family is complaining now that their iPhone batteries are going dead too quickly since I set this up. I guess the frequent polling of their GPS location is a pretty big power drain. Oops!

I thought I might be able to ping each iPhone's local IP address by assigning each a reserved IP address when connected to our wifi and pinging it, but this ran into a problem when I noticed an iPhone will stop responding to a ping shortly after going to sleep. I did notice, however, that each iPhone shows up in the Airport Setup realtime graph of signal strength for each device, even when asleep, so I'd like to find a way to access either that data, or any other means of determining the presence of our iPhones without killing their batteries.

Of course, I'm open to any other ideas for determining occupancy short of buying more devices.

I use Proximity. It polls your phone at routine intervals and executes an AppleScript when the phone comes in or goes out of range.

I'm not sure you can run separate instances of it to detect each phone. I had this set up once but did not do much testing with it. I think it can be done as long as you name each instanc as a separate app.

I use it to detect one phone and I run it on 5 computers that report back to the indigo server so that no matter where I am in the house the phone is detected. It works very well.

I have it set up to control the lights, themp, and garage door when I get home o leave the house.

There are a few more forum threads here that discuss its use. There's also a thread on how to ping iPhones.

Thank you for the reply, Matt. I'll check that out.