I picked up a Everything Presence Lite, it’s sat about 2m in front of me in my livingroom, pointed at me sitting on the sofa and detection is too patchy to be much use in a reliable automation. It drops detection if I sit still. I can move my head an inch or two, side to side and still go undetected. I couldn’t use it to control lights for example as they would just go off. Sure, I could set the timeout to a much longer time, say a minute, but isn’t that functionally no better than a traditional motion sensor? Maybe I’m missing something.
I don’t think there’s yet a magic solution to presence detection - and certainly not a low cost one. Any system needs far more data and an element of “intelligence” to produce reliable results.
I’ve had surprisingly good results using the Bayesian integration to work out which room I’m probably in. This uses Bluetooth proxies to track several devices, motion sensors, and factors like the time of day, which devices are in use etc. The results are much more reliable than they are with any single detection method, and the flip-flopping of some individual devices is smoothed out.
I use it to decide which speakers should make annoiuncements. Lights are still on old-fashioned motion sensors.
I have not tried an EPLite mmWave sensor… However I do have a few Aqara FP2 sensors connected to HA via the HomeKit Device local integration. After spending some time dialing in the FP2’s settings, I am very pleased with the performance of mmWave.
I have esphome with ld2410’s in 5 places in my home and after a lot of tweaking the settings I would say they are 95% reliable, in fact I can’t remember the last time I had an issue with anyone not being detected. You need to allow a timeout on your automatons or you will be switching stuff on and off constantly. Mine are used to turn lights and stuff like TV’s on and off if someone enters a room or leaves. I give them 5 minutes without detection to turn stuff off. Nothing worse than popping to the kitchen for a drink to find the tv has switched off before you get back. So you will need a good bit of fiddling with settings to get good performance.
The lite has the ld2450 which is not suitable for static detection (at least until hilink fix that issue in future update). LD2410 does a way better job for that
Radar sensors are great at detecting small movements to a point that they retrigger again before they even can signal clear. As a result the automation won’t tigger again because it doesn’t get a change in state.
The solution here is to let the automation at the end change the state of the entity that triggered it to off, clear or what the state should be.
Well the default clear time is 15 seconds on the Lite, which is nowhere near large enough to prevent drops in detection state when sitting still. At least for me it isn’t.
In all honesty, I only really bought it to play around with as it looked cool, I don’t have any specific use-cases in mind. I probably should’ve done more research though as I assumed it was precise enough to detect very small movements i.e a himan sitting still/breathing. Bit disappointed with it tbh but that’s probably my fault.
