iPhone Locator Binding

Do you have any interest in using the iOS OwnTracks app, running mosquitto, and the MQTT and MQTTitude bindings? All of your location information stays private to you (if you set it up that way), and you can track your whereabouts by lat,long in an openHAB item (and later where your car is, too, when you have a Mojio binding or an MQTT interface to the Mojio API).

I looked at that, but wanted to have a solution that did not require an app on the phone. The next thing about the Vera iPhone locator plugin is that it just works with your apple account and does not require anything to be installed on the phone. Pain to have the wife and kids remember to start up an app.

OwnTracks runs in the background once installed. You don’t need to open it ever again after the first setup.

Yes, but the problem is that unless you use the iCloud location data it basically kills your battery. In fact the WiKi even says: "iPhone considerations

Due to power management policies, OwnTracks on iPhone running in the background is only updating the location roughly every 10 minutes and sometimes even longer. This is blocking for many use cases that need timing wise short response."

Having a native iOS location binding would be great. @sipvoip, I would also be willing to help pay for the development.

In the absence of a binding, you may be able to access the iCloud data using something like https://github.com/picklepete/pyicloud, possibly feeding in into your openHAB via REST.

With owntracks I have another problem too. Mosquitto ,MQTTitude is installed on my home server .I access it over VPN . And this is a problem .When I go from home or from any place with wifi ,VPN connect interrupt and owntracks dont work .
What’s the solution to this?

Native iPhone plugin? :wink:

I’ll give a try with pyicloud

Can it still be a binding? If so, I am happy to pay you for your time. My requirements:

  1. Needs to support more then 1 apple account (I have 3 right now)
  2. Configurable iCloud polling period
  3. Lat / Long for each device.

Not really. It will run as a separate program and will post updates to openhab. But it will be as a prototype of some sorts, because every time pyicloud connects, Apple sends you an email. So that will become annoying real fast.
The guys from pyicloud are working on a fix (I think), which would probably move the thing I’m writing, from prototype to actually usable.

And I don’t need payment.

http://imgur.com/jkG2Nak
Got it to work. Now I just need to find a good mechanism for persisting the configuration. But still, it’s very annoying to use, as Apple sends an email for each request you make. Sure, you can make a rule to filter those emails, but what do you do if there is an actual problem with your account?

If you know someone good in python, to fix the library that is doing the iCloud requets. The guys maintaining it are very nice, but they don’t have the time to fix it.

My programmer friend finished the Mojio binding so I am going to have him write an iphone binding this week. I ping iCloud every 30 sec, so I like the binding approach better.

Even better

@sipvoip any news on this?

Still working on it.

Thanks @alex_bartis for finding pyicloud. I am new to openhab and was looking for iphone locator binding when i came across your post and believe me it is awesome. I wrote a simple python code to use pyicloud api to login to my icloud account once and then check for location every 10 mins (by adding time.sleep(3600)) in an infinite loop. This way, apple sends email only first time when i start my code.

@chinthan_yr That’s exactly what I did :slight_smile: iPhone locator bridge/binding or however you like to call it

@sipvoip Hi! How is your work?

The developer is making progress, but I had to have him go back to Moj.io to fix a few things because they changed their API a bit. I hope to have a binding for testing in a few weeks, note this will be 1.8 binding since I have no plans to ever migrate to OpenHab 2.

Cool, 1.8 is great!