Hi everyone,
I’m exploring a UWB-based device concept for Home Assistant and would like to hear from people who actually build automations at home.
The idea has two parts:
- A small UWB-only tag designed for pet collars.
- A UWB identity-aware presence sensor for Home Assistant.
The pet tag is intended for pet-related indoor presence and area detection. It is not meant to be a GPS pet tracker, a general-purpose item tracker, or a wearable identity tag for people.
The presence sensor idea is about detecting not only that "something is present", but potentially which pet, which tag, or which supported phone is nearby.
For example, instead of only knowing:
Motion detected in the living room
the system might know something closer to:
The cat is in the living room
The dog is near the front door
A pet wearing the UWB collar tag is near the balcony
A specific phone is near the desk
We are still in the exploration stage, so this is not a sales post. I am trying to understand whether this kind of capability would solve real problems for Home Assistant users, or whether it is just an interesting technology looking for a use case.
Some possible pet-related use cases we are thinking about:
- Prevent lights, fans, or HVAC automations from being triggered incorrectly by pets
- Detect when a dog is waiting near the front door
- Send an alert if a pet is close to a balcony, kitchen, garage, or other restricted area
- Pause or redirect a robot vacuum when a pet is nearby
- Detect whether a pet is near a feeding area, water bowl, litter box, or pet door
- Build automations based on pet distance or room-level pet presence, not just generic motion
There is also a separate phone-related idea.
Many newer phones, such as iPhone 11 and later models, include UWB chips. I am curious whether phone-based UWB identity or ranging would be useful for Home Assistant automations.
For example:
- Detecting which family member is near a room or device
- Triggering automations based on a specific person, not just generic presence
- Using a supported phone as an identity or distance signal, without requiring a separate wearable tag for people
I understand that iOS platform limitations, permissions, background behavior, and API access may affect what is technically possible. I am not assuming this is easy or fully open. At this stage, I mainly want to understand whether the idea would be useful if it can be implemented reliably.
A few questions for the community:
- Do you currently have automations that are triggered incorrectly by pets?
- Would it be useful for Home Assistant to know which pet is in a room, instead of only detecting motion or generic presence?
- If you could know that a specific pet is near a door, balcony, kitchen, robot vacuum, feeding area, or litter box, what would you automate?
- Are you currently using PIR, mmWave, BLE, Wi-Fi, cameras, pressure mats, or other methods for presence detection? What are the biggest problems with them?
- Would room-level pet presence be enough, or would you need more precise distance/ranging?
- For a pet collar tag, what size, weight, and battery life would be acceptable?
- Would phone-based UWB identity or ranging be useful for people-related automations?
- If phone-based UWB detection required an app, would that still be acceptable?
- What integration method would you prefer: MQTT, ESPHome, Matter, native Home Assistant integration, or something else?
- What would make this idea useless or annoying in real daily use?
I am especially interested in local-first Home Assistant use cases. Ideally, the system should work without relying on cloud services, but I would like to hear what the community expects.
Honest feedback is welcome. If you think this is a bad idea, that is useful too. I am trying to understand the real pain points before deciding what to build.