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My friends and family don't understand why I'm so happy with my air fryer notification.
(self.homeassistant)
this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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For anyone else wondering how I'm keeping track of who's where, https://espresense.com/
I tried Room Assistant a year or 2 ago and it SUCKED. I have a 4 storey townhouse and had 2 nodes running Room Assistant and I could be stood next to 1, two floors away from the other and that's the one it said I was closest to.
The idea is that by detecting the strength of the Bluetooth signal, the node with the best signal was closest, but it just didn't work (for me).
Anyway espresence is better, especially because I've doubled up and I bought 4 esp32 boards with pins off AliExpress for under £12, and arrived within a week.
You connect the little chip to your pc and flash a firmware from Google Chrome, then hook it into your WiFi, go to its page and give it a name, and hook it into your MQTT.
4 boards later I have a node per floor.
Next I added our phones to it by pairing them to it, then deleting the pairing on the phone. Add the Bluetooth connection to HA config and you're away! Well...
So you have to connect what the boards say to what it means in HA yourself. You get "bedroom" off Espresence and have a Bedroom zone but you have to put the pieces together yourself.
I ended up making binary sensors for each room in Node Red. Did I leave the room? Who else is there, nobody? Ok mark it clear... You could just make helper switches and use them but I was feeling fancy. I've already posted recently about the Binary sensor.
But once you've done that, you just base your automations off the state of the switches you made.
So the age old "The front room motion sensor stopped detecting, should the lights go off?" question, now becomes...
Huh I must have stopped typing there...
...much easier to solve. I can still have the old "TV on?, wife's laptop connected to Bluetooth?" bits in, but having Bluetooth presence detection AS WELL makes it much more reliable, for a measly £12
Noice.
But... how much faffing did you have to do to get the tuning right?
I've recently started using this and have 3 different ESP modules and I'm having a hellofatime getting them to show near-enough results, let alone accurate.
1 of them literally has the phone on top of it and it thinks it's 4m away.
I've gone upto absorbtion factor 10 (Spock) with an RSSI adjustment of 6, and that's passible on 1 device, but not another
So... what's your secret?
The secret is not caring it's 4m away as long as it says you're closest to that one. It's not accurate, it's a guess made with software.
As I've said I've sat at my PC on the front room and watched it say I'm in my bedroom and kitchen.
So for example my front room lights are based around an input boolean. They're triggered on by motion but back off by whether the TV is on, my wife's laptop is connected to the WiFi, the pc is switched off, and everyone's presence is not in the front room. I already did all that and now I have presence as well.
It used to be that my wife would be sat there on her phone and the lights would go out, now because her phone is on her person they stay on.
Like I say, they're not perfect but they are better than not having them.
I don't think I'll ever have my music follow me around the house.
Oh also try instead of basing automations around whether you are in a room, instead use "is not"
So for example when I get out of bed and get up for work by bedroom lights come on with my alarm. When I go downstairs and make a brew I am no longer in the bedroom so my automations turn off the lights in there. Is not "bedroom"
It's triggered by the motion sensor outside my bedroom door, then it waits for my presence to be anything other than bedroom. Since I'm moving around the house it'll trigger at some point.
Similarly my sleep automation turns off when the bedroom is no longer occupied. But that's when my wife gets up 2 hours after me. It's also triggered by motion, but then waits until my bedroom presence sensor no longer reads anything
Ah, ok... I see. I guess you've not filtering on distance then, ok. I see all my neighbours stuff on 1 sensor, so automatically started filtering (and then attempting to tune)
Good point on the negative room sensing, I think I need to start this again... but also ditch the crap module.
Thanks
Yeah you certainly need more than one sensor. I have one per floor
Yeah I have a million Bluetooth devices picked up but I've only put 4 of them so far into my Ha sensors. Fuck knows what the others are, but we have soany devices in the house that I can't keep track, then there's the neighbours' stuff too...
Interestingly I stumbled across a YouTube short yesterday about hacking an android device from only knowing it's Bluetooth Mac address, so theoretically I could really piss off my neighbours if they drove me to it.
Just coming back in to say that yeah, now I've used it as a primary trigger instead of a secondary check it seems I'm all over the place in Bluetooth land...
I don't have a motion sensor in my bedroom. I do have an old phone on a charging stand that I use as a Smart Clock, and the camera of that can be used as a motion sensor. It's pointed at my head when I'm in bed so it's not in an optimal motion sensor position... Just setting the scene for you.
Now I had an automation that turns bedroom lights on based on motion so when I wake up in the middle of the night for a pee I have a lamp that turns on for five minutes.
Well of course I wanted MORE from this extra from my clock, so I've added presence in the room as a primary trigger of my lamps.
I'm stood in my room watching my lights popping on and off again every 30 seconds...
Not great as a primary trigger, more a secondary check.
Anyway I'm gonna try and change it by adding "in room FOR 30 seconds" to my sensors, seems to be helping so far.
Also limiting reporting distance in the settings for each node to 4-6 meters.
Or maybe stop trying to use it as a primary sensor lol
Why not use mmWave presence sensors?
I already have motion sensors everywhere but I also have cats. They make it seem like there's people wandering around the house all the time.
I've placed a lot of them on top of door frames that seem to miss the cats, but in the front room there's sofas for them to climb up on which means they still get picked up.
I have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they're worse for picking up the cats.
So what I'm trying to do is add more sensors so HA has a better picture of who is in the house, and when.
To give you an idea, yesterday I took my wife to a Dr appointment, my kids are at their grandparents, but when I was sat on the car waiting for Wifey I noticed my kitchen lights were on in the app.
The Drs turned into the hospital and I was out for a good 4 hours, but got home and added "Is anyone home?" to my lights automations.
The cats don't need lights
You can fine tune some and the Aqara FP2 seems to do a good job ignoring pets.
Yeah I've kinda found the sweet spot now to be fair, but I'm using an esp32 board and some dude's yaml, so I've been groping in the dark a bit
This is very interesting, ~~thsni~~ thanks! How fast are the base stations? Is it all down to the smartphone speed to connect to a BT device? What smartphone are you using?
You pair the device to a base station once to create an entity but you don't have to if you know the mac of your phone. So there's no pairing involved in the tracking.
You can use the HA app to create a beacon on your phone when you're on your home WiFi and not pair anything, just plumb the id into HA.
The speed is quite fast but there is still a lot of false positives. I've sat and watched mine and my wife's phones just pinging around the house, but if you add some "for X seconds" to your automations it becomes much more stable.
I've got 3 android phones and an iPhone tracked at present
Thanks!