AVM Smart Home App Android: My experience with the new Geofencing feature

[ohb1138 (Justus Reich)]

Hi all,
I thought this might be interesting for the community knowing that my first quick shot might not attract everyone but it is work-in-progress and I am happy about any comments and ideas how to optimize this

Ok, AVM offers a new feature “Geofencing” in the app which is accessible and configurable via the “…” three button menu on the top right of the app. You can configure a radius with the size of your choice around a geo position and attach an AVM smart home action to it that will be triggered when either leaving or entering the geofence:

1. Pick a geo location from the map
2. Define the radius
3. Select an action from the existing actions on your Fritz!box
4. Watch that it triggers when either leaving or entering the geofence.

I had two “unused” power-plugs Fritz!DECT 200 and started testing with powering them “ON” and “OFF” for me and my wife when entering (ON) and leaving (OFF). I created appropriate rules in openHAB around it for turning on/off lights and heating (that are not all controlled by DECT devices) depending on the presence and I am happy with the acceptable latency from app detection and reaction in openHAB.

It should be mentioned that remote access to the Fritz!box needs to be enabled in the app.

I used Tasker before but it is always a high effort with updates and changning the phone with four family members … and yes using two (later four) power plugs as presence switches is not optimal but I am thinking on how to do this better (maybe when Matter gets better integrated).

But maybe someone finds this function ov AVM also appealing and worth playing around with it. The charme is the ease of use to me and considering that a smarthome device cost always around 50€ no matter what you do with it I can invest that for a reliable presence detection (and get the temperature measurement on top :-D)

Thanks for your comments

Cheers
Justus

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@ohb1138

I used Tasker before but it is always a high effort with updates and changning the phone with four family members

It’s still going to be less work using the approach you found, which I think is brilliant. But in the past I’ve found it’s easiest to manage deploying Tasker stuff to the family’s phones is to use the the APK builder to create an app out of an Tasker profile. Then I can email the apk file to them and they can just tap to install (assuming third party apps are allowed in settings).

No everyone will have AVM so I wanted to throw this in for those who still have to manage with Tasker.

Thanks for posting! I’ve moved this to Tutorials and Solutions.

[Piffer (Tim)]

You can even do a put request via the fritzbox, but it looks like the authorization header won’t fit into 255 signs:

[ohb1138 (Justus Reich)]

That is cool!
I did not recognize that yet. I will try this out. Did not see that it is possible now to configure an http command with a “Vorlage”

Awesome. Thanks for letting me know