AutoLocation: Geofence behavior is a bit strange. Do I need to turn on the location monitor as well?

[marco...@gmail.com]

Hi,
I bought AutoLocation yesterday and want to use it to replace the tasker location settings since Geofence seems to react quicker and more accurate (at least from what I've heard :) ). In general I dont have any problem to get it working.
However, I have quite strange behavior with my "Home" geofence (could not try more, will try "Office" on Monday! :) )
I realized that it sometimes does not correctly show my "Home" profile even if I'm home. When looking at the log it seemt to happen like approx every 30 minutes, that I exit my home geofence and almost exactly after 5 minutes I enter my home geofence again. (I dont think its just coincidence - it happens much too often and exactly for 5 minutes) I have read in the description that in case of constant switching I should increase the size of the Geofence which I did for a test, but now its starting to get so big that it becomes unusable since it covers too much area. And it still seems to exit my home geofence... I dont have Wifi turned off. Without GPS I have an accuracy of 20 - 40 meters with Wifi only. Which should really be enough, I guess. Right now I have made the geofence the same size that I used with tasker as my home location. (And still have this behavior) Actually, I hoped to get even more accurate results.
My question is now if I should turn on the "location monitor"? I only enabled the geofence monitor.
Its not really clear to me where the differences are between the geofence monitor and the location monitor. (activity monitor is clear) Of course I have read the help text, but both are location related. In order to save as many battery as possible I want to enable only the services that I really need. Since it is "generally" working even without the location monitor, I would really like to know if turning it on should improve my situation. Dont get me wrong I will try it probably right after I have written these lines, but I want to suggest to give some more information about the difference between the geofence monitor and the location monitor. (maybe in a tutorial at some point in time?) I just wonder that they can be enabled / disabled independantly from each other. I would assume they work hand in hand?!
Any additional info on this would be great! :)

[João Dias]

Hi Marco.

Thanks for the kind and considerate email. :)

If all you want is to track your Geofences, the Geofence monitor is enough most of the times. It has its own internal refresh rate that tries to save the most battery possible and still be fairly accurate. My guess is that it uses the equivalent of the "Moderate" Location Monitor setting in terms of accuracy.

The Location Monitor can be used in 2 situations:

 - You may simply want to get your location in terms of latitude and longitude

 - You may want to manually control the refresh rate and accuracy of the Geofence Monitor

Because Android will always use the best available values for location (and thus geofence) tracking, if you start the Location monitor with a 5 second refresh rate and High-Accuracy, then the Geofence Monitor will also take advantage of these higher accuracy values and have better reporting.

That's why in the AutoLocation Tutorial I use the Location Monitor to aid the Geofence Monitor when I know I'm almost near the store.

About your situation where you're detected to be outside of the geofence for 5 minutes, does that happen even if you, say, make the geofence the size of your whole country? I know it's of no use that way, I just want to know if it's because of the radius, or because of some bug in the Geofence tracking service.

Hope my description helps a bit.

João

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[marco...@gmail.com]

Hey,

thanks for your reply! Makes it a bit clearer now. :)
I played around with my home geofence and have made it with a radius of like 150m around my "real" location which seems to work quite well and still has a reasonable size. Have had no switching yet with this size. However,when using Google maps without GPS it should still be very accurate with wifi only. I'm living in an appartment with lots of Wifi around me so I'm wondering that I still need to use a geofence that is "quite big" I would assume that a radius of 50m around my real location should really be enough. Using the location feature of tasker with "net" only shows an accuracy of 25 - 40m.
Similar with my office geofence. It has a radius of like 400m so it is even bigger, but I had to increase it a bit since I still sometimes exit this fence. I could not do much more in depth tests, yet (have to work, haha :D ) I will experiment some more! :)
Having these issues I would suggest a new feature for the log list: Wouldnt it be quite easy to show the detected location points as small dots on a simple map? Just the numbers dont really help (at least it does not help me... ;) ) to see were it detects me to be. That way people could possibly determine the size of their geofence much better. Enable the location monitor for a day, sit in the office and after a day, set the geofence with the right size covering all detected location points. Sounds handy to me! :)

Now a little "off topic":
While I'm at it maybe another helpful feature: a "near geofence" condition that will enable once you are near your set geofences. That way the user does not have to make two different geofences (like you showed in the tutorial video) to increase the location accuracy near the actually important 'main' geofence.

[João Dias]

I could add a feature to show the detected location points on a map. I'll add that to my todo list.

A "near" geofence is currently sadly not possible. The Geofences are reported by the Google APIs, and all the info I get is if the user has entered or exited the geofence... nothing else. Sorry!

[Chris Laudermilk]

I have been playing with Tasker & AutoLocation for a couple of weeks now. For my work profile, I have set up a "near" geofence approximation. I think I saw the suggestion either here or on Pocketables.

This is a two-part solution. Part one is a profile that checks the Cell Near condition and when true, sets a global variable.  I also have it turn on the geofence monitor and wifi so I can get accurate location readings. Part two is a second profile that checks the global variable and geofence.

 

One of the tricks is to make sure the Cell Near condition has all the nearby cell towers in its list. I left the scan active for about 15-20 minutes & it took a couple of times before new towers stopped appearing (apparently there's a bunch with overlapping coverage near my office).

[ere...@gmail.com]

I've been playing with AutoLocation as well recently and having a very similar issue. Work my home geofence, I ended up making the diameter 200 meters which seems to work somewhat, still not perfectly; while my work geofence is currently at 300 meters and still constantly (every few minutes) jumps in and out of the geofence.

The work geofence is rather quick to leave and re-enter, seconds apart. The event itself seems to be about every 1~2 minutes apart every time.

Now I do have this setup with the location monitor to update at an interval of 60 seconds, with 2 updates, and a displacement of 3, and no matter what, it still just doesn't keep any kind of usable accuracy.

At home, there's tons of wireless, including several of my own at home from WiFi AP, Roku3, PS4 all advertising WiFi. At work, there's a LOT less WiFi, but we do have 2 APs, plus a few others around the same building within range, plus we're kinda close to the ISP's office so they have theirs also within range.

I'm not really sure why it's so innaccurate or how to improve upon it, but so far it's just not working with any kind of reliability.

This is also with Android 4.4.4 on a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 running Cyanogenmod 11.

[Marta Hintz]

I think that if you can you make 2 geofences. 1 large one and then a smaller one with high accuracy to pinpoint your location. However I find in buildings with lots of concrete I get poor GPS or data. So I start up WiFi when I am in the large geofences to get accurate location. That is how I can go in and put of work locations with a fairly high degree of accuracy.

[Eric Renfro]

I see. Yes, I looked at that tutorial, and it kinda annoys me that that's the only way to get that accuracy from such a simple thing. Are you in the circle, or not..?

So, I put it to the test. I made a larger circle to cover the arrival coverage distance, made the actual office building and parking lot in a smaller area and made only the larger geofence handle the exit event, while the start events handle the rest on each tier of it. I also use a variable to set what location I'm currently at so I can utilize that in other functionality.

It does work, but uses up 2 out of the 100 available geofences to do so. I'll be putting this to a bigger test by testing it out in various locations, like the movie theatres.. I basically have my phone go into silent mode when I'm in the reasonable proximity of a theatre, and in this case, the double-geofence zone, in theory, is better than what I had because I can more accurately track whether I actually entered the theatre that's right next to a mall. So it would only turn things back on after leaving the major area.

We shall see...

Eric Renfro

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Marta Hintz <lar...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think that if you can you make 2 geofences. 1 large one and then a smaller one with high accuracy to pinpoint your location.  However I find in buildings with lots of concrete I get poor GPS or data.  So I start up WiFi when I am in the large geofences to get accurate location.   That is how I can go in and put of work locations with a fairly high degree of accuracy.

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[Marta Hintz]

Where I live in San Diego the geo fences work well. It is just the buildings I have trouble with when I am inside them