Home Assistant

Device Tracker

Home Assistant can get information from your wireless router or third party services like iCloud or OwnTracks to track which devices are connected and considered “in home”. Please check the sidebar for a list of brands of supported wireless routers and services.

There are also trackers available which use different technologies like MQTT or Nmap to scan the network for devices.

An event (device_tracker_new_device) will be fired when a device is discovered for the first time.

Configuring a device_tracker platform

To get started add the following lines to your configuration.yaml (example for Netgear):

# Example configuration.yaml entry for Netgear device
device_tracker:
  - platform: netgear
    host: 192.168.1.1
    username: admin
    password: YOUR_PASSWORD
    new_device_defaults:
      track_new_devices: True
      hide_if_away: False

The following optional parameters can be used with any platform. However device tracker will only look for global settings under the configuration of the first configured platform:

Parameter Default Description
interval_seconds 12 Seconds between each scan for new devices
consider_home 180 Seconds to wait till marking someone as not home after not being seen. This parameter is most useful for households with Apple iOS devices that go into sleep mode while still at home to conserve battery life. iPhones will occasionally drop off the network and then re-appear. consider_home helps prevent false alarms in presence detection when using IP scanners such as Nmap. consider_home accepts various time representations, (E.g. the following all represents 3 minutes: 180, 0:03, 0:03:00)
new_device_defaults   Default values for new discovered devices. Available options track_new_devices (default: True), hide_if_away (default: False)

The extended example from above would look like the following sample:

# Example configuration.yaml entry for Netgear device
device_tracker:
  - platform: netgear
    host: 192.168.1.1
    username: admin
    interval_seconds: 10
    consider_home: 180
    track_new_devices: yes

Multiple device trackers can be used in parallel, such as Owntracks and Nmap. The state of the device will be determined by the source that reported last.

known_devices.yaml

Once device_tracker is enabled, a file will be created in your config dir named known_devices.yaml. Edit this file to adjust which devices to be tracked.

Here’s an example configuration for a single device:

devicename:
  name: Friendly Name
  mac: EA:AA:55:E7:C6:94
  picture: https://home-assistant.io/images/favicon-192x192.png
  track: yes
  hide_if_away: no

In the example above, devicename refers to the detected name of the device. For instance, my_iphone.

Parameter Default Description
name Host name or “Unnamed Device” The friendly name of the device.
mac None The MAC address of the device. Add this if you are using a network device tracker like Nmap or SNMP.
picture None A picture that you can use to easily identify the person or device. You can also save the image file in a folder “www” in the same location (can be obtained from developer tools) where you have your configuration.yaml file and just use picture: /local/favicon-192x192.png.
icon mdi:account An icon for this device (use as an alternative to picture).
gravatar None An email address for the device’s owner. If provided, it will override picture.
track [uses platform setting] If yes/on/true then the device will be tracked. Otherwise its location and state will not update.
hide_if_away False If yes/on/true then the device will be hidden if it is not at home.
consider_home [uses platform setting] Seconds to wait till marking someone as not home after not being seen. Allows you to override the global consider_home setting from the platform configuration on a per device level.