Using this add-on, devices on your local network can be added as a 'thing' in the Candle controller. Automations can then respond to their presence. For example, turn on the lights at night when your mobile phone connects to the wireless network. Or turn of the heater when none of your phones or laptops are on the network.
- You can change how many minutes a device must 'disappear' from the network before it is marked as being away. The add-on scans your selected things continously. When you press the (+) button on the things page, and also once every hour, it does a deep scan to find new devices on your network.
- If the human-readable name of a device is not known, then it will try to look-up the device manufacturer, and use that as a name. The add-on does not connect to the internet to do this. It is done locally, on the gateway, so your privacy is protected.
- This add-on uses 'ping', 'arping' and 'arp' to scan the local network.
A thing is linked to a mac-address of a device. Nowadays some devices, like iphones, change their mac-address once in a while to make tracking difficult. This is a great privacy feature, but it may also hinder this add-ons ability to track (i)phone presence.
- Versions before 0.1.0 continously ran deep-scans. This was very processor intensive.
- Since version 0.1.0 it only scans the devices you added to your things page. The add-on now has a much higher scan rate, and can respond to devices re-connecting to the network in just a few seconds.
- Version 1.0 added some new privacy features
- Version 2.0 is a big overhaul for Candle 2.0, which includes avahi scanning and can ignore Candle devices (enabled by default), and enabled additional privacy protection (no longer uses mac address as part of devices IDs)
- Version 2.1 adds a UI
Michael Stegeman (formerly of the Mozilla Foundation) helped a lot in getting this add-on to work optimally. https://github.com/mrstegeman