Defining and identifying locations by WIFI SSID's

[Chris]

As an ex-Easy Profiles user there seems to be a big omission in Automagic. In Automagic I can define a location by using the GSM network /wifi and it sets coordinates for that location. However, the hospital where my wife works has a number of dead spots where her phone loses the signal completely. When she gets to work her phone will (usually) recognise that she is there and the 'location entering' trigger fires and the sounds on her phone are switched off. But, because of the dead spots, the signal gets lost and the 'location exiting' trigger keeps firing, switching her volumes back on and causing considerable embarrassment and annoyance in the middle of surgical operations.

The way that Easy Profile handles locations is to allow for them to be defined in a number of different ways (GPS obviously being one), cell towers (too broad and variable to be of any use), or by wifi access points. By choosing wifi it would scan and remember all the access points in the vicinity of the hospital. That was how the location was defined. If it ever detected ANY of those wifi AP's then it knew she was at the hospital and would switch the volumes on the phone to off. I also had the ability to go deeper into the hospital and add to the original list of access points.

The whole process worked incredible well and it was a very simple and accurate way of defining a location, and got around the problem of flaky cell reception and dead spots.

I know that there are numerous WIFI triggers etc. in Automagic, and I know about 'WIFI Available', but there is nothing that is as simple as what Easy Profiles has.

With Automagic's WIFI Available I can only look for 1 AP. I realise that it stores all the available AP's in a variable, but I'm then left with the huge and complex task of writing a script to read stored wifi access points from a file where I have saved the AP's that are in the vicinity of the hospital, and then trying to compare the strings in the 2 lists to see if there is a match, and then taking the appropriate action and exiting. Trying to do this for entering and exiting the hospital just got ridiculously complex and I had to give up.

Please would you consider adding the option to define a location by the access points in it's vicinity, and having something to detect if ANY of those are available? It would make the whole process of location based actions in Automagic a lot more flexible and user friendly.

Thanks

Chris

[inReinbek]

You can use the known "Wifi Available" with the variable "access_points" ... it finds all available AP's at the moment they were available of switching WiFi on.

How about this:

save manually an ascii-file within all known ssid's were be listed - one ssid in a line

(If you want to disable the full phone 'cause it's a hospital: Toggle Flightmode=on)
Toggle WIFI=on

Condition "WiFi Available"
Action Type "Init Variable Text File" to load that file (defined above - with VARIABLE KNOWNLAN)

Condition Type "Expression"
indexOf (KNOWNLAN; access_points) >=0

YES: switch sound off
NO: switch sound normal

both of above connect to
Toggle WIFI=off

Start this about every 5 minutes

[Chris]

Thanks you for your suggestion. I'm still fiddling around with it get it to do what I want. While it might enable me to do what I want there is no denying that it far from quick or convenient to go through this each time I want to add a new location based on WIFI AP's. If there is somewhere I go on a regular basis, where I need to scan for the access points and use them to identify a location, this is going to be a major headache and impractical, whereas Easy Profiles can do it in a couple of taps. Sorry to keep banging on about Easy Profiles (I far prefer Automagic!), but the way they identify locations is so quick, simple, and flexible that I really do think that it something that Automagic should consider adding as a feature.

[wolfy]

+1 !!!
Me too