I have a few old automations that are designed to unlock my front door, or open my garage door, depending on how I leave. If I ride my bike or car, it opens my garage, if I leave via front door, it opens the front door. Pretty simple. Except!!! I did this in pieces, so it’s 2 separate automations. One detects my phone entering the “home zone”, the other detects an event firing (iOS triggered the event via ‘shortcuts’)
There is now “zone based” automations, and there is also my “person entity”. So the way I see it, I have 3 different ways to tell when I come home:
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My phone’s gps enters the ‘home zone’
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My HA ‘person’ state changes from ‘away’ to ‘home’
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My phone’s shortcut app fires an event that is detected.
I feel like #1 and #2 are the same, no? I only have one device linked to my person entity, and it’s my phone. Is there any difference in this case? Is there a preferred choice?
My router (FRITZ!Box) provides entities for all network devices, whether they are currently connected to the network or not.
I trigger all my stuff on when my phone connects/disconnects to my home WiFi. For me this is the best, simplest and least error prone way.
For your use case this would mean needing to have WiFi reception outside your house / in front of your garage, and having your phone reliably and quickly connect to the WiFi when you get home, which might not work great, depending on the strength of your WiFi outside your house.
I had this same setup with my Eero router integration, but I found that if my laptop or desktop was accidentally left on, and the sleep timer was inactivated, HA would think I was home. So I’m just using GPS of my phone to do my person stuff now.
That sounds like you had your Home Assistant person entity tied to your computers too. If you just go off of your phone’s presence, your laptop or desktop really shouldn’t have any effect on that.