Entering or Leaving a Location

[Meik0]

Greetings Community,

I’m Alexander. Started using Olisto after Stringify’s announcement that is shutting down since everything else running from a phone is inferior. Olisto is not perfect but at least it does some of the things i had in Stringify and it has timers! In a very inconvenient way but at least it’s there.

I’m kinda confused with the Entering or Leaving a Location condition and why it’s merged and not two seperate triggers in the location channel.

I wanna set a trigg

When it is 10 minutes before Nighttime, Enter Location Home Then Turn Dining Room Light On and Send a notification.

In a similar manner

When Left Location Home Then Turn Dining Room Light Off and Send a notification.

I achieved what i want partially with Nobody is Home and Someone is at Home. The problem though with Someone/Everyone is at home is that it will turn the light on if i’m at home and it won’t trigger only if i enter the zone for Home.

I tried to combine the triggers (Someone Enter or Left a Location and Being Home) but Olisto did not even bother to run the Trigg.

Can i have any insight on why Entering and Leaving are not 2 seperate entities and how can i achieve what i want?

BR,
Alexander

[jeroenr77]

You should look at the location triggers as being at and not being at x location.
Not entering or leaving.
Small differences, but an important one.
You could use it as no phone is at location turn off lights, a phone on(any, not all) on location turn on light

Hope this helps

[Daniel]

This is correct for location conditions, except for the ‘Someone entered or left location’, which is active for a single moment when any phone enters or leaves the location. This condition can be combined with any of the other conditions to achieve exactly what you’re looking for - prevent the trigg from running when other conditions become true while you’re already (not) at the location (which is not what users commonly want, but you’re not the first to ask). So it seems to me that you’re using it as it was intended.

If it doesn’t work there might be several things going wrong. The first being that location triggers on most phones are just not very reliable. This is a problem you will encounter with any automation service, simply because the underlying functions in Andriod and iOS don’t work so well.

To help troubleshooting you could add some triggs; one that sends a push message just when ‘someone at home’, another for when ‘noone at home’ and a third for ‘Someone Entered or Left’, all for the same ‘home’ location ofcourse. Just to figure out whether the locations trigger at all, if it’s a problem with one of the individual conditions or a problem with the combination of conditions.

[Daniel]

It seems that there is indeed a problem with the ‘Someone Entered or Left a Location’ condition. We’ll look into it.

[Daniel]

The issue should be fixed now.

[Meik0]

I’ve tried to troubleshot/check in the same manner before writing my post, just through notifications as a “Then”, and so far i wasn’t able to trigger the “Someone Entered or Left” function at all. Let alone having it combined.

All other triggers work as intented, most of the time .

I’m glad you found there is a bug behind it, i suspected so. Hope you can deliver a fix. I really like how Olisto works. I hope it gets even better.

–Edit @Daniel–
Wow, what timing. I’ll test and report back! Will it come as and iOS app Update or…? Thanks!

@jeroenr77
That is a very simple way to automate though. It’s simple and straightforward, does what it’s supposed to do but it does not offer vercitility and exclusivity in scenarios. In my point of view the “Being at X Location” should serve as a passive switch that you always want providing being at home. For example if it’s Night time and I’m home (does not matter if i just came in or already there) start “Scene Whatever which includes certain Devices”.

With the “Somone Enter or Left” into the Conditions though, in combination with “being/not being in location X”, gives you great versatility and a really nice detailed way to achieve certain things with specific/detailed conditions that you do not want to trigger only by “Being At x Location” condition all the time.

Imagine the consumption of an air condition or a boiler for example if you simply trigger it with only “not being at work” condition or “being at home”. Now when you throw in the mix the “Leave or Enter” condition you streamline it to do exactly what you want, when you want and not sort off. To give you a percpective, for example, you want to achieve an automation that if you leave work to start air conditioning. The only way to achieve this with current triggs is, theoretically, "IF [someone entered or left Work], [none is at Work(so it does not trigger when entering)] THEN [Turn on the Air Conditioning]. So in that way it only triggers in work days by leaving a specific area and it does not trigger anytime your are home.

Now, as you said, if we look at the location triggers as Being and not being at X location, Olisto is no better than IFTTT for example. Which is not true. It’s way better in most aspects. So the differences between them are not small. They are impactful and if combined correctly they are very powerful and usefull.

BR,
Alexander

[Daniel]

Thanks for the compliments @Meik0! That’s exactly why we started Olisto - because we wanted something more powerful than IFTTT, yet simple enough to be useful for most people.
The issue was in our servers, so no app update needed for that. It should just work now.
A bit of a theoretical note about the difference between ‘being or not being at a location’ and ‘entering or leaving a location’. First of all, the difference only matters when you combine the location condition with one or more other conditions. When only the location condition is used it doesn’t really make a difference - a Trigg only runs when it’s conditions become true anyway. Which for a ‘being at home’ condition would be exactly when you enter the home.

It does matter when you combine conditions though. And in that case it usually makes sense to use the ‘being there’ condition. Consider a Trigg like ‘when I’m at home and the sun is set then turn the lights on’ - you’d probably simply want the lights to be on when you’re at home and it’s dark out. Regardless whether you came home while it was already dark (so ‘being home’ is the condition that changed) or the sun set while you were already at home (so ‘sun is set’ is the condition that changed) - you’d just want your lights to be on.
Also, a key feature of Olisto is the ability to arbitrarily combine conditions. Combining ‘statefull’ conditions such as being home, the sun being set or your thermostat being in a specific mode makes a lot of sense because they can actually be true (or false) at the same time; combining ‘momentary’ or ‘event-like’ conditions such as ‘entering home’, ‘sun sets’ or ‘activating mode on thermostat’ makes no sense because they (practically) never happen at the same time, so your Trigg would never run if it has more than 1 such ‘momentary’ conditon. This is why we choose to offer conditions the ‘statefull’ way whenever we can.

[Meik0]

I can confirm it’s fixed on my end

[Daniel]

Great, thanks for letting us know!