Auto open when return from walk (no vehicle)
We often leave via the garage when going for a walk.
With previous system, which only used geofence, garage door would open when we got close to home.
With Tailwind, have to open app on phone and manually open the garage door.
I guess we could carry a vehicle sensor while on walks to trigger the auto open.
Any other way to trigger auto open using geofence without Bluetooth?
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Official comment
Hi Harlan,
Tailwind will not open the door even if you carry a vehicle sensor and your phone with you on your walk. The system is tuned to specifically look for you either driving / riding a vehicle, or riding a bicycle.
You could try using IFTTT as that might work.
Comment actions -
I dedicated one vehicle sensor to my bike, so I know that auto open works with my bike. It never occured to me the Tailwind algorithm was velocity sensitive. How about an enhancement which let's a user ignore velocity so they could carry a vehicle sensor on walks? Or an enhancement which let's users intentionally ignore bluetooth for auto open, knowing that this lessens security of the Tailwind auto open algorithm.
How would I use IFTTT to trigger Tailwind?
Does IFTTT have a location/geofence trigger? Or is there a way to use the location of my smartphone to trigger Tailwind in IFTTT?
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I actually have the opposite problem. When I come home from a walk and enter the house through the front door (no Bluetooth peripheral connected to my phone), the garage door will often open automatically.
When I check the app history it tells me that I opened the door (same message I get when I drive home).
I can't seem to disable this and I am concerned that I'll walk home and the garage door will open without me realising.
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Hi Max,
The only way for us to determine what's going on would be for you to send a bug report from the Tailwind app, and then email us at support@gotailwind.com requesting that we review it and get back to you. That said, there are no cases that I can recall where the garage door opens without an Android phone detecting the assigned bluetooth connection. We did have issues with that happening on some iPhones due to an iOS bug but that was fixed.
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I just had the same thing happen to me that happened to Max Reynolds. I was walking home when the garage door opened. All four of my vehicles were off, so I don't think my phone could have connected to bluetooth. I was identified in history as the one who opened the door.
I know it's a longshot, but if Max Reynolds is still here, I'd love to hear what support said to you. -
Our team is working on this right now. We have been able to identify there is a bug but it is incredibly difficult to reproduce and quite rare. According to the logs in our app, on rare occasions the Android OS is actually telling our app that a vehicle bluetooth connection is present when in fact it is not present (was disconnected). We do not currently know how or why this would happen but our Android developers are working hard to find the cause and fix it. In the meantime you can "reset" this bug if it has occurred by momentarily toggling the location permission for the Tailwind app to "do not allow" and then back to "always". It will also "reset" automatically the next time your phone connects to your vehicle bluetooth.
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Hi Stuart. Yes please contact support@gotailwind.com
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I've had the same thing happen to me in the past couple days; this morning and yesterday morning, coming home from a walk, the garage door went up as I got near our house. Also, a few days ago, I was driving my older car (which I didn't set up with Tailwind, as it as HomeLink built in), and the garage door came up automatically then too. The history shows that I opened the door, but in all of these cases my bluetooth wasn't on (on my phone).
My phone is a Google Pixel 6 Pro, running Android 14.
I will try toggling the permissions to see if that fixes anything. I also just cleared the Tailwind app's cache, just in case.
Probably unrelated, but a couple weeks ago, I was prompted to update the firmware of the opener, which I did.
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Hi Everyone,
I just hired a new Android developer. One of his first tasks is to look at this bug. Somehow the Android OS reports to our app that the vehicle bluetooth is connected when it isn't. I've seen the bug reports with my own eyes, and checked the time stamps of the entries against customer feedback and it's definitely happening. The new guy is a genius and I am hoping he can find out how this is happening and what we can do to correct this.
Mark - if it happens consistently with your pixel buds pro connected and does not happen with them disconnected it seems as though somehow your pixel buds pro have been set up as the "vehicle". Tailwind does not know if a particular bluetooth device is a vehicle or not. When you set up a vehicle on the Android version of our app, you are telling our app "if this Bluetooth device connection is active, that means I'm driving XYZ car". Customers use after-market GPS devices for this. Customers that ride motorcycles use their helmet communication devices. What does NOT work are BLE devices such as smart watches - those change their MAC addresses frequently.
Anyways - I'm really hoping the new guy can figure this out and fix it. We have never been able to recreate this bug - not even once - so it has been incredibly frustrating. -
Yes the new developer is making good progress on it, but again - we have never been able to reproduce the bug so we have to rely on feedback from beta testers - but they have a hard time reproducing the bug as well because it's extremely rare.
We think we have it fixed and will release an app update as soon as we feel confident in it.
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