I need vertical distance as well as horizontal
July 12, 2023 9:21 PM Subscribe
Do all smart door locks use similar geofencing technology?
I have what feels like a pretty extreme edge case, but really kind of isn't. When we moved to our current condo, I bought an Ultraloq Pro for our unit's front door, because I loved the idea of a biometric lock, and also of auto lock/unlock. I like the lock overall, but soon discovered an annoying issue with the auto-unlock.
It, like I suspect most similar products, is geofence-based, where you drop a pin on your location and it draws a border (in ultraloq's case the smallest of which is approx. 300 meters) which if you stay inside that area, auto-unlock will not trigger.
I live on the 7th floor of my building, in a dense center-city neighborhood in Portland (OR) and two of my most common trips are to the recycling area of my building (in the parking garage on the ground floor) and to the grocery store nearest my building (literally across the street). Many of my other leavings are probably less than 1000 feet away as well - Portland's city blocks are famously small (200x200 feet), so a decent amount of my day-to-day outsiding is probably done within 1000ish feet of my building.
So for a great many of my trips out, I am not more than 1000 feet away from what the app sees as my building, and the auto-unlock does not trigger (auto-lock is time-from-unlock based, and always works as expected).
So that is my question: are there any smart locks that measure distance from the lock itself, or use some other way of judging both horizontal and vertical distance, and don't rely on the physical location of a building as denoted by a pin drop on a map?
This is a verrrrrrrry minor inconvenience, not a legit "problem"; I just couldn't find anything conclusive about how other lock brands do their auto-unlock sensing, and thought I'd see if my hunch that they all do the same basic geofence thing was true.
I'm guessing they do, and if they do that's fine. If that is the case, followup question: what is the smallest geofence radius you know of for a smart lock? 200m is about as small as I can find (Yale brand).
I have what feels like a pretty extreme edge case, but really kind of isn't. When we moved to our current condo, I bought an Ultraloq Pro for our unit's front door, because I loved the idea of a biometric lock, and also of auto lock/unlock. I like the lock overall, but soon discovered an annoying issue with the auto-unlock.
It, like I suspect most similar products, is geofence-based, where you drop a pin on your location and it draws a border (in ultraloq's case the smallest of which is approx. 300 meters) which if you stay inside that area, auto-unlock will not trigger.
I live on the 7th floor of my building, in a dense center-city neighborhood in Portland (OR) and two of my most common trips are to the recycling area of my building (in the parking garage on the ground floor) and to the grocery store nearest my building (literally across the street). Many of my other leavings are probably less than 1000 feet away as well - Portland's city blocks are famously small (200x200 feet), so a decent amount of my day-to-day outsiding is probably done within 1000ish feet of my building.
So for a great many of my trips out, I am not more than 1000 feet away from what the app sees as my building, and the auto-unlock does not trigger (auto-lock is time-from-unlock based, and always works as expected).
So that is my question: are there any smart locks that measure distance from the lock itself, or use some other way of judging both horizontal and vertical distance, and don't rely on the physical location of a building as denoted by a pin drop on a map?
This is a verrrrrrrry minor inconvenience, not a legit "problem"; I just couldn't find anything conclusive about how other lock brands do their auto-unlock sensing, and thought I'd see if my hunch that they all do the same basic geofence thing was true.
I'm guessing they do, and if they do that's fine. If that is the case, followup question: what is the smallest geofence radius you know of for a smart lock? 200m is about as small as I can find (Yale brand).
GPS altitude data is notoriously unreliable, and elevation data based on mapping can't take account of where you are in a building, so I don't think what you're looking for is going to be possible.
Do you typically go in one direction away from your building? If, for example, you typically go north-east from your building can you set the location of your home to be artificially far away to the south-west, so that the edge of the circle is closer to where you want it to be?
I do think that locks exist which lock and unlock based on a bluetooth connection between your phone and the lock, and I'm sure you could set something up based on whether or not your phone is connected to your home WiFi network. I think you'd have much more luck with one of these options.
posted by alby at 2:21 AM on July 13, 2023 [5 favorites]
Do you typically go in one direction away from your building? If, for example, you typically go north-east from your building can you set the location of your home to be artificially far away to the south-west, so that the edge of the circle is closer to where you want it to be?
I do think that locks exist which lock and unlock based on a bluetooth connection between your phone and the lock, and I'm sure you could set something up based on whether or not your phone is connected to your home WiFi network. I think you'd have much more luck with one of these options.
posted by alby at 2:21 AM on July 13, 2023 [5 favorites]
I do think that locks exist which lock and unlock based on a bluetooth connection between your phone and the lock
This is exactly what I came here to recommend. I don’t have any specific products to tell you about, but many smart locks operate this way as opposed to (or as an alternative to) strictly geofencing. Bluetooth connection would definitely not make it to the ground floor from the 7th.
posted by tubedogg at 8:07 AM on July 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
This is exactly what I came here to recommend. I don’t have any specific products to tell you about, but many smart locks operate this way as opposed to (or as an alternative to) strictly geofencing. Bluetooth connection would definitely not make it to the ground floor from the 7th.
posted by tubedogg at 8:07 AM on July 13, 2023 [2 favorites]
^^^ Exactly, regular, normal bluetooth is rated at about 10 meters before you factor in interference from appliance and walls and the like.
posted by mmascolino at 11:27 AM on July 13, 2023
posted by mmascolino at 11:27 AM on July 13, 2023
Can you set a timed auto lock? Our smart lock (Schlage Encode Plus) is set to re-lock after 4 minutes, regardless of my location. That would resolve the geofencing issue.
posted by bluloo at 12:12 PM on July 13, 2023
posted by bluloo at 12:12 PM on July 13, 2023
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posted by birdsquared at 10:54 PM on July 12, 2023