Little known feature on Home Assistant is the ability to have any phone who has home assistant installed to be able to use it as a trigger. So you can see things like battery left and gps location. I have an automations that will ping the last location of my family members when the phone hits 2% power so I can see their last location right before the phone dies.
I use home assistant and have a dashboard button that triggers an automation.
Using the notification action, I turn off do-not-disturb, turn off Bluetooth (so it doesn't pipe sound to earbuds or remote audio), set notification mode to on (not vibrate) and set the notification volume to max. I used to loop the default notification sound, but then switched so that the notification uses a new channel entirely and set each phone with a song so it will play for a while. You can silence it with the volume key.
Took a little tinkering to get it right, but works really well.
great idea, but a suggestion.
instead of just one ping at 2%, do three within 10 seconds of each other. this would determine direction and rate of travel.
You can just remotely enable high accuracy mode for a minute and it will trace their path on a map cleanly.
_action: notify.mobile_app_your_fone metadata: {} data: message: device_high_accuracy_mode data: silent: true high_accuracy_mode: turn_on channel: loc __
wouldn't that either be disabled due to the low battery or eat up the remainder of the battery?
I would think snapping coords, even at low accuracy, would be more power efficient since it technically doesn't have to connect to more satellites and requires less compute.
Ohhhhhh fantastic idea!!
Well that's pretty cool. So when You ping, does it save this data or do you have to actually be present for the ping (on your phone)?
How do you ping a location update? I've tried sending the hidden sms that's supposed to do is but it only seems to work about 25% of the time, and I have to run the actual location check like 3-4 minutes later
Don't use sms. Use the home assistant notify skill. It will notify my phone using the notify.notify skill.
But if I'm going to do 3 pings for the direction of the pings, then I gotta figure out a different solution.
https://fmd-foss.org/ Here you go :)
Brilliant!
How does it go for chewing thru the phone battery tho?
I am using this one. Texting or messaging my phone (on anything that makes a notification popup) with the text "fmd password location" gives me GPS coords. More than enough for me, and works even from a borrowed stranger's phone.
Setup steps require ADB though, because in the phone ecosystem getting "unusual" permissions usually requires business deals with Google/Apple.
Works awesome, Dev is super responsive. Donate if you can.
That sounds great. Will check it out.
I just wanted to add a thankyou for sharing the link. What a great solution!
Just set this up myself. Its quite nice
Definitely have to check this out, thanks man!
Of course, no problem!!
I have been hosting my own server for a few months bow. Works amazingly. One thing is their seems to be two versions of the server, make sure the one you install is the actively maintained one.
Not self hosted but this works great. https://preyproject.com/
just send someone a massage to call you ๐คท
How does one send a massage? ๐
Like this: ๐
FYI, I came across an app called FindFamily on F-Droid, but it looks like a vibe-coded vaporware, and who knows what server it's connecting to in the background.
On device, I'd trust OwnTracks, Colota, or GPSLogger, then use Dawarich or Reitti on the server. That is, if you are interested in device history, which could be useful in tracking a lost device, or just having your personal memoies saved.
These do not provide defensive measures like photo or remote wiping. FMD can do that over SMS if the phone is disconnected from the server.
I use owntracks with a free cloudaqmp plan for the mqtt broker. It felt safer than trying to manage my own mqtt open inf the internet. The data is decrypted and parsed by a dedicated node on my main node red instance.
I think I will try a combination if dawarich and FMD. Any reason other apps like colota are preferred to the dawarich app on the device?
Never tried it. It looks like maybe the mobile app is not available from open source repos.
Ah it seems they released the android app very recently and it is not FOSS.
I use Dawarich on my server and Colota as the app on my phones. It is quite good but has some minor shortcomings with multiple devices and being able to see previous routes ONLY FOR THE ACCOUNT YOU'RE LOGGED INTO (so not family member phones) but is fine for live location for all devices. Also you use a browser to track location instead of an app which is a minor annoyance.
I had been using Traccar and liked that but after moving to GrapheneOS, the Traccar client would not stay running in background.
I tried FMD-FOSS and couldn't get it to fully work. This serves a different purpose than those listed above and I ended up not really needing it.
I tried all of the other popular options and even linking one to Nextcloud and didn't care for them or couldn't get them to work. Reitti and GPS Logger worked but I prefer Dawarich and Colota.
I had this and switched to reitti with owntracks specifically to work with multiple family accounts. Owntracks is not as nice as Colota in most ways, but shows the live location of my family. I had some stability issues with dawarich using multiple devices (most likely user error) but liked it. I do think that reitti has a nicer interface and features, but probably a matter of taste.
I'm not too familiar with that functionality as I don't use Google services, but I guess you want something that shows you where the phone is. I have been tracking my phone's movements using Phonetrack for Android sending data to the Phonetrack app on my Nextcloud instance. I use it with other phones in the family as well.
Maybe the combo of Reitti (server) and GPSLogger (Android) can help.
For wiping, it makes sense to use something else.
This could work, I'll check it out
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!