Home Assistant

Proximity

The proximity component allows you to monitor the proximity of devices to a particular zone and the direction of travel. The result is an entity created in Home Assistant which maintains the proximity data.

This component is useful to reduce the number of automation rules required when wanting to perform automations based on locations outside a particular zone. The zone and state based triggers allow similar control but the number of rules grows exponentially when factors such as direction of travel need to be taken into account.

Some examples of its use include:

  • Increase thermostat temperature as you near home
  • Decrease temperature the further away from home you travel

The Proximity entity which is created has the following values:

  • state: Distance from the monitored zone (in km)
  • dir_of_travel: Direction of the closest device to the monitored zone. Values are:
    • ‘not set’
    • ‘arrived’
    • ‘towards’
    • ‘away_from’
    • ‘unknown’
    • ‘stationary’
  • dist_to_zone: Distance from the monitored zone (in km)

To enable this component in your installation, add the following to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
proximity:
  home: 
    ignored_zones:
      - twork
    devices:
      - device_tracker.nwaring_nickmobile
    tolerance: 50
    unit_of_measurement: mi

Configuration variables:

  • zone (Optional): The zone to which this component is measuring the distance to. Default is the home zone.
  • ignored_zones array (Optional): Where proximity is not calculated for a device (either the device being monitored or ones being compared (e.g. work or school).
  • devices array (Optional): A list of devices to compare location against to check closeness to the configured zone.
  • tolerance (Optional): The tolerance used to calculate the direction of travel in meters (m) to filter out small GPS coordinate changes.
  • unit_of_measurement (Optional): The unit of measurement for distance. Valid values are (km, m, mi, ft) [kilometers, meters, miles and feet respectively]. The default value is kilometers.

To add multiple proximity components, simply use a list in your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
proximity:
  home:
    ignored_zones:
      - twork
      - elschool
    devices:
      - device_tracker.nwaring_nickmobile
      - device_tracker.eleanorsiphone
      - device_tracker.tsiphone
    tolerance: 50
    unit_of_measurement: mi
  home3:
    devices:
      - device_tracker.tsiphone
    tolerance: 50
  work:
    devices:
      - device_tracker.elanorsiphone
    tolerance: 10