Home Assistant HACS Addon + Historical Location Sync

[radh21301]

Hello. I see that we already have a way to import data from Home Assistant by editing configuration.yaml and automations.yaml. From people's comments, looks like it works, but it would be much easier for most people (including me) if there were a HACS addon or a Home Assistant addon that could send data to Geopulse without manual config edits.

Side question: if Home Assistant goes down, OwnTracks keeps logging offline and then uploads everything once HA is back online. Would it be possible for the integration to also look at the Home Assistant location history for a selected device and send all of that to Geopulse, instead of only sending the most recent location? Maybe the current method already does that?

I guess this would also apply when Home Assistant is running but Geopulse is down — the integration could catch up by sending the missed history once everything is back online.

I found this interesting project that exports the location information in HA database to GPX file. Though it might help Geopulse get historical information:
https://github.com/rubiojr/hass2geo

[tess1o]

Hello,

I'm not really familiar with Home Assistant world so I have no idea how to implement addons :)

HA automation approach (currently described as a way to integrate HA and GeoPulse) doesn't really support retry to queue mechanism. When a new GPS point comes to HA it automatically tries to send it to GeoPulse. HA doesn't care if GeoPulse received the point or not.

So currently for all types of integration GeoPulse is receiver - it waits until someone sends a new GPS point to it. We don't go to external systems to ask "do you have new data for me"?

As far as I know the same architecture is used by all similar apps like GeoPulse.

I do agree that it might be not optimal and it's much better to have some queue or retry mechanism on HA side when GeoPulse is down but at this stage I don't think I can invest time in such addon implementation.

It would be really nice if someone from the community can do it because many other apps (like Dawarich, Reitti) will also benefit from such addon.

Thanks.

[Dixet]

I've written home assistant custom components before, so this should not be too difficult.

But if people are savvy enough to install and use HACS they probably are able to put some YAML lines in the configuration.yaml. The automation can be done through the UI, no yaml editing necessary.

Side question: if Home Assistant goes down, OwnTracks keeps logging offline and then uploads everything once HA is back online. Would it be possible for the integration to also look at the Home Assistant location history for a selected device and send all of that to Geopulse, instead of only sending the most recent location? Maybe the current method already does that?

Home Assistant is event-based. Something happens (a button is pressed, the room temperature changes, a device reports a new location) and home assistant can react to that. If OwnTracks indeed caches gps points when the connection is not available, and then uploads them at once, I am not sure how home assistant would react. It would probably see a lot of location changes within a very short period of time. So I hope the creator of the OwnTracks integration has taken that into account and will just discard batch-uploaded data points.

Anyway, if I were to create a home assistant integration, I would probably not build in historical data uploads to geoPulse. If home assistant is down, it will not log gps point to send. If the connection between a devicetracker and home assistant is not available, I do not believe historical data will be created after the connection has been restored. So the purpose of historical (last 10 days) data is quite an edge case which can be handled with scripts like the one you linked.

[Dixet]

I've created a first version of a home assistant integration for GeoPulse.

It's just a very basic one at the moment with

• a setup screen to enter token, url and sensor to monitor
• reporting of location changes to the GeoPulse api
• a single sensor that reports the last time information was sent to GeoPulse

With this integration, users do not need to edit configuration.yaml files or add automations. The integration handles all of it.

I've tested it myself, but it would be great if other home assistant/geopulse users could give it a try and give feedback.

The integration can be found here: https://github.com/Dixet/homeassistant_geopulse

Manual installation or through HACS (with custom repository, I'll add it to the official repository later)

[kaeelo5]

I've created a first version of a home assistant integration for GeoPulse.

It's just a very basic one at the moment with

• a setup screen to enter token, url and sensor to monitor
• reporting of location changes to the GeoPulse api
• a single sensor that reports the last time information was sent to GeoPulse

With this integration, users do not need to edit configuration.yaml files or add automations. The integration handles all of it.

I've tested it myself, but it would be great if other home assistant/geopulse users could give it a try and give feedback.

The integration can be found here: https://github.com/Dixet/homeassistant_geopulse

Manual installation or through HACS (with custom repository, I'll add it to the official repository later)

I have tried this but doesnt' work for me. Is there a way to troubleshoot why it's not working for me? Also doesn't seem to have any adjustment options for frequency?

[Dixet]

Great that you want to try this integration.

Could you create an issue on the component's GitHub (link)

More details than "it doesn't work for me" would be helpful:

• Can't you install the integration?
• Can't you add a device to the integration?
• Isn't it logging to GeoPulse?

Any information from your Home Assistant logs and a screenshot of the error would also be useful.

Regarding adjusting the frequency: would you like to report more or less often? The integration currently reports every change of the monitored device_tracker, just like the example automation in the GeoPulse documentation. Reporting more frequently doesn't make much sense, as there would be no change in location to report. For less frequent reporting, I don't see a use case, but if you can explain why you'd want that, I can consider an adjustment. The easiest way to achieve this now is to use a device_tracker that updates it's location in Home Assistant less frequently.