Vehicle sensor only works 20% of the time
Ok so i'm 2 weeks or so into my tailwind experience (Shoutout to Scott for his awesome customer service during my install questions as he was driving cross country and still finding time to reply to me). So far so good, for the alerts. One small suggestion would be an auto close after a certain time, aside from the alert. Maybe I want an alert at 5 minutes, but i'm ok with that, because my kids may be out playing, or I may be unloading things, but after 30 minutes, perhaps I want it to auto close. Just a thought.
Now for the Vehicle sensor. I'm stumped. It is connected to bluetooth, I can go into the 'vehicle' and 'sensor diagnostics' and it shows strong signal, full battery. But it rarely works to open / close the garage automatically.
I found the video about troubleshooting through the diagnostic tools, so I tried that, but it never detects a sensor. But immediately afterwards I can go into 'vehicles' and sensor diagnostics, and it detects.
Tips?
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Official comment
Hi Jason. The option to auto-close after a certain amount of time is already there. If you go to "My Notifications" you'll see an option to notify you after a certain amount of time if the door has been left open. Underneath that is an option to also close the door, not just notify you. If you turn on that checkbox it will close the door.
As for the Diagnostic Tool, we did find a bug in the last iOS release and I'm assuming you're using an iPhone. We've fixed that bug and will release an update soon, but that pertains only to the Diagnostic Tool, not auto-open / close in general.
Please try restarting your phone to see if that gets things working again for the auto-open.
Also, please make sure you've updated your vehicle sensor firmware at least 1 time, and that you're running iOS 13.
If you've done all that and it is still being a problem, please do the following:
Go for a drive. You need to go more than 1,500 feet away from home (as the crow flies). Then return home. If the door does not automatically open upon your arrival home, please open the Tailwind app as soon as you can. Tap the top left corner to get back to the main menu. Then tap "Send Bug Report". Fill in basic details and send it. Then send an email to support@gotailwind.com letting us know you just sent a bug report as instructed by Scott and we will review it ASAP and let you know what is going on, and how to get things working.
Auto-open / close is extremely reliable but we do find cases where there are issues. Sometimes it is GPS signal integrity. Sometimes it's network connectivity. Sometimes the vehicle sensor firmware hasn't been updated, or the sensor is too far away. There are a number of things it could be, but once we find whatever the cause is and address it, it works nearly 100% of the time. My iPhone has not failed to auto-open even once since we addressed the changes Apple made in iOS 13 (which was a mess for a while). They changed their Bluetooth scanning algorithm and that's what made it necessary to update the vehicle sensor firmware.
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I'll work on the troubleshooting tonight for the sensor and see what happens and get back to you.
Yes i see that there is a 'close door' in the notifications, but if i have it set to notify me at 5 minutes, then the only option is close the door at that 5 minute time frame. I don't necessarily want it to just close at 5 minutes.
So a separate time would be required here, or something like close door on the 4th notification. I'm ok with it being open for 5 minutes, but at the 20 or 30 minute mark, i probably want it auto closing.
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Scott, so it worked yesterday when I came home, this morning it did not close (I have a camera in my garage so I check when i'm at bottom of street).
When I pulled into driveway it did not work, I opened app to send a bug report and the instant I opened the app, the garage started opening. So does that tell me that the app has to be running?
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This is the result of recent iOS updates becoming extremely aggressive at suspending our app. We are working on an app update to fix this. As you arrive home your phone is designed to "wake up" the Tailwind app so it can send the door open command. Then iOS will suspend our app again. This is done to conserve battery power and is nothing new. In recent releases of iOS we are noticing that it is getting extremely aggressive - in some cases not giving us anywhere near as much time as it used to for our app to connect to the server and send the open command.
However when you open up your phone, iOS allows our app to run again - so it finally gets the door open.
We are working on adjusting things to this new iOS behaviour.
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