Additional presence detection agents on flashed nodes

ESPHome
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1

I’m in the process of flashing (bricking & unbricking) ESP-based & other devices with a combination of Tasmota & ESP firmware.

I’m wondering is if it’s possible for these live & semi-trusted IoT nodes/end-points to act as additional presence agents, that already are/will be scattered around my site, so that I can improve the fidelity of my presence detection, rather than adding additional hardware dedicated to these tasks.

eg. if/when the presence a WiFi or BLE device is detected - phone, headset, watch, etc - then have detecting endpoint-agents - my lightbulb, switch, PIR sensor, whatever - signal the my MQTT broker with the MAC’s & signal-strength.

This is on their ‘down-time’, in addition to their primary function.

2

Can’t see why not!

3

sorry, I should’ve been more clear: how?

still feeling my way around things (and cursing the things the Java under mosquitto is doing to my box), so not sure how this would be achieved?

AFAICT, comms is effectively surface-level via MQTT signals, but not sure how to … instruct(?) the endpoints to pass on listener events too.

4

What? Not sure what this means?

5

If the end-point devices have Bluetooth then they can use the BLE device tracker component. From that you can then track those BLE device in HA to give you your presence detection.

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