Geofencing for home security

I’d love to see geofencing incorporated into the home security. When i leave home the security system would automatically Arm and when i came home it would automatically disarm. This is my wish list for 2025.

Thanks

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Wyze definitely needs to integrate this into their app and their automation rules/actions.

FWIW I actually already do this with Wyze HMS. The 3rd party Wyze API in Home Assistant allows us to change the Wyze HMS status to armed or Disarmed and we can do geofencing rules through Home Assistant too. So I can already setup my Wyze HMS to arm itself when everyone in my family leaves home or disarm whenever anyone in the family comes back home. So anyone who doesn’t want to wait for Wyze to do this within their own app, you can do this through a Home Assistant integration right now.

But again, Wyze still needs to make this possible themselves through their official app.

Thank you.
Can you explain how to do it. I would really appreciate it.

Thanks :blush:

Have they ever improved geo fencing to put the work on the AC powered fence instead of having the phone check at intervals using battery power?

I am curious if methods have changed since I last looked at geo fencing.

I will tell you that it can be a little complex to do. You will need to setup either a VPN or reverse proxy or pay for the Nabu Casa subscription to allow accessing your Home Assistant instance away from home, but here are general steps:

  1. Install Home Assistant
    • (You can load it as a virtual machine on an existing computer, or buy a mini device dedicated to being a home assistant hub. I started by loading it as a virtual machine on my laptop, then I moved it to be a “Docker” container on my Synology NAS, then I decided to buy a dedicated “Home Assistant Green” device to run it. I may eventually upgrade to using a mini-PC or server instead)
  2. Install the Home Assistant Community Store Add On (HACS)
  3. Install the 3rd party Home Assistant WyzeAPI through the Home Assistant Community Store (you can run a search about installing Wyze API in Home Assistant on Youtube. That’s pretty much what I followed…then I used an AI to ask more questions to help me set it up)
  4. Get an API Key and Key ID from Wyze Developer Api Console - WYZE since you will need to use these to enter into the Wyze API along with your Wyze login and password. The API Key and Key ID help prove to Wyze that you are giving permission to use your Wyze account in another program.
  5. Install the Home Assistant Mobile App on your phone and login to your Home Assistant device/account.
  6. Setup a way to access Home Assistant away from home. You have 3 options: You can setup a VPN (Tailscale is a common free option people like to use). You can setup a reverse proxy that will just have the Home Assistant app reroute through the internet to your home assistant computer (this option will require doing some port forwarding, etc), or you can pay Nabu Casa like $60/yr to handle all the cloud stuff for you. Depending on what you choose, I would suggest googling steps to walk you through how to do that, and maybe asking an AI for additional help.
  7. Then, In the mobile App go to Settings - Companion App - and go through all the settings. In particular, make sure you select “Manage Sensors” and enable all the location sensors so it knows when you are home or away. (Do this for anyone in your household you want it to track for being home or away)
  8. In Home Assistant settings go to “Zones” (Areas, labels and zones) select Zones and Add Zone for your home location. Make it reasonably big to cover a little more than your property.
  9. Create a “Person” for yourself and anyone else in your household you need to know as being home or away. Then select the “Devices” that belong to that user (ie: Your phone).
  10. Once Home assistant and Wyze and your phone zone is all setup, now go to settings then Automations - Create Automation - Create New automation. Now where it says “When” Add a trigger - choose “Entity” then “State” For entity, choose your person. set the "From as “Home” and the “To” field as “Away” (This says that if your status changes from Home to Away, then do the action). Under “Then Do” Set the action to “Device” Wyze Home Monitoring System and action Arm Wyze Home Monitoring System Home with whatever your code may be (that is not my actually code in the screenshot, just an example):

    If you have multiple people to track then there are lots of better ways to do this. For example, you could do something like the following:

In that case, it will check if everyone is not home, and if so, it arms the system, otherwise if anyone comes home, it disarms it…but I think it actually has to be coded a little differently like this:

actions:
  - device_id: 111111deviceid111111
    domain: alarm_control_panel
    entity_id: 111111entityID11111111
    type: disarm

There are several other ways this could be accomplished. I am personally fond of using “Helper Groups” for my purposes, but that is an extra thing to learn and I’m trying to avoid overcomplicating things when you’re just starting out.

Yes and no. Unfortunately, Geofencing probably still works the same as the last time you checked. However, the thing about using geofencing with Home Assistant (compared to basically ANY other app) is that you can decide all the details…the update frequency, the accuracy, maybe even just have it check in when Google was already updating all the sensors, so it doesn’t even use any more battery than your phone was already going to use anyway and many other options. I wish all apps gave us such control. I can decide when my phone switches to high accuracy mode and for how long, or if it just updates sensors whenever it does normal check-in and all sorts of stuff. I have not found a single app that is better at doing geofencing. I can make it work exactly how I want and exactly how accurate, and configure zone sizes, etc. I wish they were all like this. We can only guess at what methods other apps use and how much they drain the battery when we allow location tracking for geofencing. :-1:

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Thanks for the explanation and update.

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