Home Assistant device_tracker always shows not_home

[blysik]

Describe the bug

The Home Assistant device_tracker never knows the car is home. Even if proximity.home_tesla is 0, the device_tracker entities never show the car as home.

Expected behavior

If the car is parked at home, the device_tracker should say 'home'.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):
Normal usage.

Environment

• TeslaMate version: v.1.19.3
• Type of installation: Docker
• OS TeslaMate is installed on: Docker installed on Intel NUC, RHEL
• HA v0.109.4

[ngardiner]

The proximity sensor determines the distance between the zone (home) and the device-tracker specified. So if your config is:

proximity:
  home_tesla:
    zone: home
    devices:
      - device_tracker.tesla_location
    tolerance: 10
    unit_of_measurement: km

You can check:

• Does device_tracker.tesla_location correctly show the location of your vehicle on the map in lovelace
• Is the Home zone defined under zones with an accurate Lat and Lon value?

[blysik]

• I have that exact proximity block, yes.
• device_tracker.tesla_location does show the correct place on the map.
• Home zone is defined correctly in the configuration.yaml, and in Configuration -> Zones -> Home -> the longitude/latitude are correct.

Everything appears correct, except the actual device_tracker always shows not_home. It's super strange to me. Maybe I should try deleting it?

See the attached image below. (I covered the long/lat, but it's correct.)

[ngardiner]

Yes I see what you're referring to and I have the same on my side.

I suspect that the state of the device tracker is updated by an automation and not by the lat and lon. I will do some research and get back to you, but I suspect there's an automation required to check if the device_tracker entity is within the home zone radius and if so to change status to home.

[blysik]

That seems reasonable. I'll experiment with automations also and see if I can make something. I was just under the expectation the logic was already there somehow. Thanks.

[blysik]

My understanding is that this block will always set not_home:

- alias: Update Tesla location as MQTT location updates
  initial_state: true
  trigger:
  - platform: mqtt
    topic: teslamate/cars/1/latitude
  - platform: mqtt
    topic: teslamate/cars/1/longitude
  action:
  - service: device_tracker.see
    data_template:
      dev_id: tesla_location
      location_name: not_home
      gps:
      - '{{ states.sensor.tesla_latitude.state }}'
      - '{{ states.sensor.tesla_longitude.state }}'

Maybe the location needs to be a template, based on proximity. If proximity 0, than home, if not, then not_home.

[blysik]

This automation seems to work for me properly. Not sure if it's the most elegant method.

- alias: Update Tesla location as MQTT location updates
  initial_state: true
  trigger:
  - platform: mqtt
    topic: teslamate/cars/1/latitude
  - platform: mqtt
    topic: teslamate/cars/1/longitude
  action:
  - service: device_tracker.see
    data_template:
      dev_id: tesla_location
      location_name: >
            {% if is_state('proximity.home_tesla', '0') %}
              home
            {% else %}
              not_home
            {% endif %}
      gps:
      - '{{ states.sensor.tesla_latitude.state }}'
      - '{{ states.sensor.tesla_longitude.state }}'

[ngardiner]

Nice work! I like it, I wonder if there's a way to check which zone it is in and then return the zone name, otherwise not_home? It would be very cool to have the zone updated, eg work or school based on zones defined in HASS. I might have some time to play around with this shortly, but your change above should certainly take care of home/not_home status transitions.

[ngardiner]

You know, I think this is the default behaviour. The HASS doco says:

The state of your tracked device will be 'home' if it is in the home zone, detected by your network or Bluetooth based presence detection. If you’re using a presence detection method that includes coordinates then when it’s in a zone the state will be the name of the zone (case sensitive). When a device isn’t at home and isn’t in any zone, the state will be 'not_home'.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/device_tracker/

As a test, I've dropped the location_name parameter entirely from the automation and it is correctly picking up "home". I'm not in a position to test other zones at the moment but I suspect removing the override will let HASS figure out the zone itself.

[blysik]

aha! that's great, and makes sense. I'll remove it also. I don't have any other zones setup, but i'll see about doing that in the future.