Accurate detection of a specific person in a room

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Has anyone been able to figure out a way to tell exactly who is in a specific room? I’ve tried bluetooth with Bermuda, but after days of trying to configure it and wanting to tear out my hairI’ve decided bluetooth just isn’t the way. With regard to Bermuda, I followed the setup guides to the T and during setup I get all the values I want, but then I’ll randomly jump around the house or I’ll be right next to my scanner and it’ll say I’m 100m away and other times I’ll be around 5m away and it’ll think I’m right next to it. It’s way too inaccurate for me to want to run any automations with. Not sure if it’s my scanner or my phone or both but it just doesn’t work well for me.

I also don’t want to use cameras because I’d like a solution that I can use in a bedroom. I thought about maybe tracking RFID tags but idk if that’ll be any better than bluetooth. Has anyone thought of any other way of doing this?

Thanks!

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Right now it feels like mmWave sensors are the best bet. Here’s an example that uses ESPHome at its core, although you’ll find vendors with HomeKit ones, Zigbee ones, etc. They are still not always reliable in certain circumstances, but it’s the closest I’ve come to decent room presence sensing.

I’ve also tried threshold sensors that basically just count who comes and goes. It works if there’s only one entrance, but if there are two or more you have to do some really gnarly logic to gets things in sync.

Here’s an ESPHome external module for that, although you have to build your own hardware:

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You could perhaps “improve” the accuracy of Bermuda in conjunction with mmWave. For example a template sensor that changes based on the Bermuda sensor, but only if the mmWave sensor says there is somebody in that room.

I installed Bermuda in each room and found it jumps between floors and is therefore of limited use. But I only wanted to speak announcements to the room I was in, so I just sent it to my phone instead. What is it you’re wanting to do if somebody specific is in the room? I’d be looking at alternatives.

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I’m glad it’s not just me lol. I didn’t realize how fickle bluetooth can be. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ve been building some mmwave sensors with esphome using them together with Bermuda might improve the accuracy.

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I’m in the sam boat as you are, @shadow1349

I initially set up Bermuda, but quickly realized that to get reasonably accurate results I’d have to have a Bluetooth node (or whatever it’s called in Bermuda) in every room, preferably smack in the middle of it :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I guess it’s easier for me as I only have one floor, but still that turned quickly into a no-go.

Moved on to ESPresense and tried to move the nodes to the corners as far apart from each other as possible - but I still get the jumping around thing. Plus: I had to set up 2 nodes just for my garage to get a reasonably reliable reading if the Tile sensor, that’s in my car, is in there or not.

And don’t get me started on tracking a phone :frowning:
Or my Fitbit.

I originally wanted to play an announcement on a or all speaker(s), if I was not next to my phone by checking if the Fitbit and the phone were close to each other. No way to get that to work :sob:

The disadvantage with the mmWave presence trackers is, that they cannot distinguish who is where, so I use them for presence detection in the office or the den where they trigger automations no matter who is in the room.
The issue with those guys is that the cheap ones aren’t reliable and the reliable ones aren’t cheap - plus a little issue I haven’t manage to address even with the expensive Aqara FP2 is the following scenario (abridged):

  1. Somebody comes into the office - the light turns on when it’s dark enough :+1:
  2. The person gets into the ‘desk zone’ - the monitors switch on :+1:
  3. A second person enters the office - nothing happens :+1:
  4. The second person leaves the office - the FP2 briefly thinks nobody is in the office or the desk zone any more and turns the monitors and the light off :-1:
  5. After 10 seconds the sensor thinks somebody came back into the room and turns the monitors and the lights back on :confused:
  6. The first person leaves the office - the light and monitors are all turned off :+1:

This leaves the first person in the dark and with the monitors turned off for abut 10 seconds which is - let’s simply call it - not an ideal situation.

I’ll raise a separate thread for that, maybe somebody has an idea.

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I actually heard from someone who has a pretty unique setup. Basically, you set up a bunch on mmwave sensors with esp32 boards and esphome around your place. Then you basically make it so that the ble tracking is only active if there is movement detected by that device. I have yet to try is out but it seems rather clever. I was already planning on building mmwave sensors for most of the rooms in my house anyway.

Here’s the yaml file they sent for that

uart:
  tx_pin: ${uart_tx}
  rx_pin: ${uart_rx}
  baud_rate: 115200

ld2420:

binary_sensor:
  - platform: ld2420
    has_target:
      name: Occupancy
      id: occupancy
      on_press:
        then:
          - esp32_ble_tracker.start_scan
      on_release:
        then:
          - esp32_ble_tracker.stop_scan

I would hope this would help to make it so that you’re not jumping around to different places too often.

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Can you run the mmwave sensor and the BT proxy on the same board?
Otherwise, I’ll be very quickly running out of power sockets :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Seriously:
Do you have a linkt to that discussion?
Was it on this board here?

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Yes you can run a BT proxy on the same board.

Here the link, it was on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1i9aewv/comment/m95da37/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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Thanks for that - interesting read :+1: