Using AlertTicker with PositionGuard for family presence — design question

[clundin]

Hi! 👋

Quick note to say I love what you've built here. Found AlertTicker via Smart Home
Junkie's coverage and immediately knew it would work great with what I'm building.

I'm the developer of PositionGuard, a privacy-first
family location app with a native Home Assistant integration. The integration
exposes two relevant entity types:

• device_tracker.<member>_in_<group> — whole-group presence (home / not_home)
• binary_sensor.<member>_at_<area> — per-area presence (on / off)

(Open source if you're curious about the entity structure:
https://github.com/positionguard/positionguard-homeassistant)

I plugged AlertTicker into my dashboard pointing at the binary sensors and got
a nice scrolling presence awareness card. Looks beautiful — exactly the ambient
family-presence feel I was hoping for.

One question I'd love your take on, since this is your domain:

AlertTicker's model is "alert persists while the entity is in the trigger
state," which is perfect for things like "door is open" or "leak detected."
For presence, the natural state can last hours (someone is home all evening),
so the alert sits there continuously rather than firing as a moment.

How would you approach using AlertTicker for transition events — "someone
just arrived" rather than "someone is currently here"? Is that something
you've thought about, or would you treat it as a different use case entirely
(e.g. trigger an automation that flips a transient boolean helper, then alert
on that)?

Genuinely curious what the right design pattern is for moment-style alerts
in your card's model.

— Chris

[djdevil]

Hi @clundin, great use case and thanks for the detailed question!

You're right that AlertTicker's default model is "sustained state" — the alert stays visible as long as the entity is active. But you can get moment-based / arrival-only notifications today without any helper variable, using auto_dismiss_after:

alerts:

• entity: binary_sensor.person_alice_home
  state: "on"
  message: "🏠 Alice just arrived home"
  theme: success
  auto_dismiss_after: 30 # alert disappears after 30 s even if sensor stays "on"
  How it behaves:

Sensor goes off → on — alert fires and shows for 30 seconds
After 30 s — alert auto-dismisses, even though Alice is still home
Sensor goes on → off (she leaves) — no alert (state is no longer "on")
She arrives again — alert fires again for 30 s
This gives you the discrete "just arrived" moment without a sustained presence alert cluttering the dashboard.

If you also want a departure notification, combine it with on_change:

alerts:

• entity: binary_sensor.person_alice_home
  on_change: true
  message: "👤 Alice presence changed: {state}"
  auto_dismiss_after: 30
  on_change: true fires on any state transition (arrival and departure), and auto_dismiss_after keeps it a brief moment-based notification.

No separate automation or helper variable needed.

[clundin]

Perfect — auto_dismiss_after is exactly the right primitive for this. The on_change pattern with both directions is even better than I imagined.

Going to test it tonight on my own dashboard with arrival/departure for my family group. Will update our integration docs to include this as the recommended companion pattern for moment-based presence alerts.

Thanks for the thoughtful answer — this is the kind of design clarity that makes me glad I asked rather than just guessing.

— Chris

[clundin]

Quick follow-up — pushed an updated README that includes AlertTicker as the recommended companion widget for moment-based presence alerts, using the auto_dismiss_after pattern you suggested. Both the state-based ("Sally arrived at school") and on_change variants are documented. Thanks again for the design clarity.

README section, if anyone stumbles into this thread later:
https://github.com/positionguard/positionguard-homeassistant#companion-widgets

[clundin]

Hi djdevil,
Hope you're well. Quick heads-up: I'm about to polish the PositionGuard HA integration README with screenshots, and I'd like to include one showing AlertTicker rendering a PositionGuard presence event — likely something like "presence changed: Away" using the auto_dismiss_after pattern from our earlier exchange.
Just wanted to give you a chance to flag any concerns before it lands in the README. Happy to share the specific screenshot before publishing if you'd like to see it first. Either way, AlertTicker stays as the recommended companion widget. Thanks again for the design clarity from earlier — it's worked beautifully in production.
— Chris

[djdevil]

Hello @clundin yes no problem thx ☺️