Home Assistant not switching to away when beacon is away

[alexmat]

I have a beacon on my keychain. When I'm home it shows up as being in the hallway. When I leave it still says hallway in Home Assistant, but it says 'not found' on the presence server. How can I get it to set the home assistant state to away?

When I take it into the living room, the state changes to living room and vice versa, so that works.

[nemik]

This might be a Home Assistant bug rather than a Happy Bubbles one. What does your config look like? 'Not found' in presence server is correct if it's gone, but HA doesn't seem to be picking it up.

[alexmat]

Here's the config I use:

• platform: mqtt_room
  device_id: e2c56db5****6f0_0000_0000
  name: 'Husk Keys'
  state_topic: 'happy-bubbles/presence/ha'

Not sure whether it's the HASS side not reading the away state change or on the presence server not publishing it. Here's the HASS component code: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/blob/dev/homeassistant/components/sensor/mqtt_room.py

Does it look like it's doing the right thing to interpret the MQTT messages the presence server is sending?

[ryhanen]

I am having the same issue. HA doesn't seem to be getting the away-info correctly. Instead it is stuck with the latest happy bubble that has seen the beacon. Running latest HA version from the docker image.

[nemik]

You guys need to add this to your config for your sensor:

timeout: 5
away_timeout: 60

you can change the values for whatever you want, but HA needs that timeout to know when to 'expire' a sensor as away when it doesn't see it for some amount of time.

[ryhanen]

Ok, that sort of solved the issue, but at the same time made the setting "Only Send Changes in Location to Home Assistant" unusable as HA then consideres a beacon that stays in same place as "away" after the timeout. I had misunderstood that presence server would send "away-event" or something like that to HA after it's own "Last Seen Treshold" has passed.

[nemik]

I know...and I'm sorry about that, but there's just not much I can do about it with the way HA works. The problem is that Home Assistant doesn't seem to have any type of event it accepts to tell it that a beacon is away. So the only way to detect away in that case is for it to stop receiving notifications about that sensor.

If it was added since I wrote this functionality or if there is another way to handle this, please tell me and I'd be happy to issue and update and resolve this issues for you guys.

[wpeterw]

When the iBeacon is gone Happy Bubbles presence server sends this message:

happy-bubbles/presence Beacon is most likely in with average distance 0.000000

Wouldn't it be possible to add "away" as a "dummy location" ?

[mellowmerlin]

Why not just send 'away' as the location?

The 'only send changes in location to home assistant' option is so promising...but completely useless without some kind of away notification.