What is Reddit's opinion of OwnTracks?

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owntracks - it's like google location tracking.

syncthing - peer to peer file sharing - much better than owncloud in that it lets me have access to my files offline.

+1 Owntracks, I installed it earlier this week, it works well and you can even install a real time map to see where each device is located. (or near real time)

Docker image information:

Owntracks recorder (displays a real time map of sorts single layer)
Owntracks Frontend (displays a real time map of sorts with layers.)

The nice thing about Owntracks is all the GPS data is stored 100% on your server.

You can look into owntrack and setup a self hosted version where all the data is stored on your personal server.

You need an MQTT broker setup for it.

https://owntracks.org/booklet/clients/recorder/

Shoutout to Owntracks.

Free, open source, and runs on your own hardware at home. Big Data can't sell your location data if they don't have it. (Not that you aren't being tracked a thousand other ways...)

Mine runs on a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant that does a bunch of other stuff for me too.

You might want to take a look at OwnTracks.

In short it's an open-source project for transmitting location data (and more) to an MQTT server, but they do a better job of explaining it in their docs: https://owntracks.org/booklet/guide/whathow/

If your family is on iOS, the Find My feature might work fine for you already.

If you're on Android or mixed, you could install e.g. php-tracks-recorder and use it with the OwnTracks app. The server part provides something like Google Location History (i.e. it stores all users' locations over time) but also sends a list of your family members' last known locations back to the OwnTracks app. You could probably set something up so that older records are purged from that database if you don't want to keep records.

Here's the docker-compose.yml snippet that I use:

---
version: "3"

services:

  ibeacon:
    container_name: ibeacon
    environment:
      UUID: XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
      MAJOR: 0
      MINOR: 0
    image: dominikth/rpi-docker-ibeacon:latest
    network_mode: host

In the case of OwnTracks, I then used this guide.

> that wouldn't really be possible.

That sounds like a Tasmota thermostat, home-assistant or openhab with scripts to detect phone presence on wifi or owntracks and an esp8266 with sensors like BME280s feeding into MQTT.

Two separate machines. Unraid is running on my older machine. I recently got a newer machine, installed Proxmox on it, and moved my Unraid docker containers over to an Ubuntu VM on the Proxmox machine. I tried using an unprivileged Ubuntu LXC, but I had issues with overlay2 when restoring the container from a backup.

You can find a lot of tutorials for presence detection in HomeAssistant (HA) since it is so fundamental to home automation routines. Owntracks, like the HA app, relies on location updates from your smartphone's OS. See more on that here and here. Therefore the answer to your question is "it depends". Let's just say that I would not recommend only using Owntracks or the HA app (your phone) for home presence. It is unreliable at best.

It's best to add more methods of presence detection and combine them with a bayseian sensor (in HA). For example, HA makes it easy to get connected devices from your home router which can be used for presence detection. I usually find that my iPhone connects to the home wifi more reliably than Owntracks/HA app reporting my location as home.

Have not tried this yet, but on my to do list.

https://owntracks.org/

Open Source, you can self host. I do remember reading if you want google maps integration, you need to use their API. It also uses openmaps as well I believe. Its been a few months since it was added to the to do list.

I turned it on just for COVID-19.

For those who don't want a private company tracking your location, but find it potentially useful to track movement during this pandemic, there's the open source https://owntracks.org/

Have you checked the location mode? In Move mode the battery usage is higher as it publishes a new location at most every 10 seconds according to the booklet.

https://owntracks.org/booklet/features/location/

How about you give Significant location change mode a try and monitor your battery usage?

I use owntracks ranging https://owntracks.org/booklet/tech/json/ which gives me the distance my phone is from iBeacons in my apartment. Then just calculate the closest beacon

This does mean you have to have your phone on you.

Could be done, but I'm trying to keep the number of dependencies down. I did look at the OwnTracks docs to check though, and as far as I can tell they do support MQTT. For now at least, there are no plans to implement MQTT in Hauk, but if I start getting a lot of requests, I may reconsider later.

Owntracks might do what you want. Open source and you can run it with your own server, though I found the set up a pain. Not sure what services it needs to run on android though.

https://owntracks.org/

Be cautious if you have Android devices. Per owntracks documentation: "Beacons are no long supported in OwnTracks for Android and will be removed in future releases." https://owntracks.org/booklet/features/android/

https://owntracks.org/booklet/features/android/ "Beacons are no long supported in OwnTracks for Android and will be removed in future releases."

I don't want to buy hardware that may suddenly stop working with an app update.

On iPhone, there are 4 update methods:

https://owntracks.org/booklet/features/location/#ios

I use Significant Change mode and get good results. I find that reporting is generally faster when you're traveling in a car (as opposed to on foot) because those "significant" changes are closer together.

Update - early troubleshooting seems to point to the Owntracks app on my iPhone. It seems to not send updates when it should. The whole telemetry sequence (OT->cloudmqtt->home assistant) works fine when I open the app and send my fix, manually.

Can any Owntracks iOS users recommend a setting to use? The iOS app has 4: "quiet", "manual", "move" and "significant changes". I've been using "move" mode, hoping it's the most verbose (don't care that much about battery, day-to-day). In iOS Settings I've got background app refresh enabled, as well as cellular data.

Edit: This is totally an Owntracks issue. I found this page in the Owntracks docs. Seems to indicate that they think it's not a problem, just the way the OS works. Having to keep watching this app, every day, and making sure it's working today is basically unacceptable.

Automation supposed to be automatic!