GPStracker in OH3

Setup, Configuration and Use Items & Sitemaps
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I haven’t seen this captured anywhere, and not sure if this right place to highlight this change to OH3 but the GPSTracker binding has had what I view as a significant and breaking change in moving from OH2 to OH3. In OH3 the regionTrigger Channel no longer allows for Linking of an Item to the Channel from the UI and the regionTrigger must be incorporated in a rule to determine if the person is entering or leaving the Region. In OH2 this was handled through binding and no rule was required for the tracker to work. The release notes for OH3 do not mention this or any changes affecting GPSTracker, implying everything works as in OH2. Further the GPSTracker documents also do not include this change. The only tip I found is the notation on the regionTrigger Channel. Its left to the user to figure out the rest. Probably not the best idea, especially for a new user.

Here is an example based on the item Link I created for myself which seems to be working for me. In this example “EX” is the unique OWNTracks ID and “Home” is the regionName as defined by the user in the System Distance Channel of the GPSTracker Binding. The Item vGPSTrackerEX_RegionTrigger is a SwitchType Item that is defined in Text file and is manually Linked to regionTracker Channel so that it can be used to signal when EX is in the Home region (ON) or outside of the Home region (OFF)

.items

Switch vGPSTrackerEX_RegionTrigger "EX OWNTRacker Presence [MAP(own_tracks.map):%s]" <man_3> {channel="gpstracker:tracker:ex:regionTrigger" [profile="gpstracker:trigger-geofence", regionName="Home"]}  // OWN Tracker
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Open an Issue on GitHub. That is the place where the developer can fix it.

1 Like
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Just a heads up, I tried to do it the manual item way, but that wasn’t working. I was able to use the Channel trigger. The hints say to use Home> or Home< for the trigger, but on mine, Home/enter or Home/leave will trigger the rule. Not sure if you found this out somewhere else or not…hope it helps

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Thanks for the update and your experience. Using text files to manually link the item to the channel as I shared in my example is working fine for me. The “Hints” (> <) definitely don’t work. However I will give your suggestion a go. For a release OH3 seems to have a many gaps, especially for those of us migrating from 2.5x, but I have found work arounds.

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Yeah, I have no idea why the text file item didn’t work for me, but I guess that’s all part of learning the new way of doing it…