Geofence location

[rlebel]

Wow geofencing is very cool! But I am a bit mystified by what happens when I am creating a new region and select the location. Intuitively I thought this would let me set the center of the region but it seems that all it does is show me a map with my current location. Is there any way to create a region for an area without being at that actual location?

[AdminWes]

Hi rlebel,

Not currently. It's fixed at your current location. We might add this option in the future, but wanted to get it out and into our users hands. Adding the option to place the center would require quite a bit of work for small feature gains since most users just tag their home and work locations.

Wes

[rlebel]

Okay, I see your point but I can see times when it could be really useful - even if I am just doing home and work, maybe I want to set up my work location while I am at home. Since I can't edit anything about a region once I have created it I am stuck with the definition (e.g. radius) until I get back to that place.

[AdminWes]

Hi rlebel,

Yes, we understand the use cases. It's a time vs benefit tradeoff. We may add this feature at some point depending on demand and other priorities.

Wes

[GuitarBuilder]

I second the request; perhaps it could be done by entering a set of lat/long coordinates (which one can find on Google Maps)?

[shyavitz]

I have set my "HOME" location with a radius of 150m. When leaving home, I get notified that I have left the region when I am a reasonable distance away from home.

However, when I am returning to the home region, I don't get notified until I'm already in my garage. My home location was set from about 10m of that, so why am I not notified earlier. The result is that my program to turn some lights on is not being executed early enough.

[AdminWes]

shyavitz,

Please see our website for information on geo-fencing, how it works, and what you can do to improve it:
http://mobilinc.com/geofence/

Wes

[kaphely]

Hi, I love geofencing but I have exactly the same problem as shyavitz.

When I leave home, I get the notification and my ISY variable is correctly set. I actually receive the notification pretty much at the exact same spot every day.
But when I return home, most of the time, I will get notified when I get in my driveway or even later when I am actually in the house. That kind of kills the purpose of geofencing. Sometimes I actually never get notified of my arrival.

I am following the recommendations for geofencing from the link you posted since it came out and I still can't get it to work reliably. I even set the radius to 350m. I would have thought this would have been enough for it to have time to detect I am crossing the fence when I approach home. Most of the time my iPhone is awake and playing music in my car so I don't see what else I can do to make it react quicker.

Please take a look at it and test the feature a bit more to make sure there are no bugs on your side. It would be really nice to have it work all the time. I just hope it is not a bug in IOS because then it'll be hard to fix for you guys!

By the way, Mobilinc HD is an awesome app.

[shyavitz]

I've played with this more and had very limited results until my last try. Usually, no matter the status of my iPhone, notification did not occur until I was actually in my garage. My programming was intended to turn on the garage lights while I was coming up my long driveway.

My recent success with this worked much better, the lights came on while I was coming up my driveway. What was different? I had the Google Maps APP open! The bad part, if this is what it takes, is to have to start this APP while driving during dark hours!

[Jimbo]

I don't know how geofence works on the iPhone since I'm using Android. But with android and Tasker I have a large geofence around my house which turns on higher accuracy reporting which enables gps tracking, then trigger events based on a smaller area.

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