I’m still looking for a reliable method of presence detection given the following criteria.
iPhones
Large 3000 sqft+ multi story house
cisco router that doesn’t allow ssh login
cannot reliably count on kids leaving network active or constantly having an app running.
My latest thought has been to look for some type of bluetooth to zwave or WiFi device that I could plug into the wall that would recognize when a device enters a room and would then signal HA that a device is in the house. Beacons seem to do just about the opposite. They tell your phone where you are. But in this case we know where we are and want to tell the house we are there.
What about nmap tracker? It should be able to ping your devices and know if you’re in the house or not. And i’m thinking to modify that component to disable interval scanning and allow on demand scanning. So it will theoretically scan the network again for devices maybe a minute after a door sensor (window sensor if you have kids…) is triggered
I would be more than happy with home/not home detection. But it needs to be reliable with an iPhone. I single out the iPhone because of the feature where it drops the network and goes to sleep when not in use.
This will be nice for many reasons. But, it still requires that the app be running on the phone. That’s something that can’t be guaranteed, so from a presence detection perspective, it sounds like it is equivalent to several other solutions out there. Now from the ability to control HA remotely, and it sounds like customize some of the access, this will be a great addition.
Tell me more about detectors? If I understand beacons correctly, they are just like the little map kiosk at the mall that says “You are here”. From a presence detection perspective, I know where I am. I want HA to know where I am. I haven’t looked into detectors, tell me more about them please.
I did nmap trackers for a while and they are pretty good. I can limit them to only scan the devices I want scanned which makes them quick. But they still run into the problem when my iPhone goes to sleep. Suddenly it thinks no one is at home and HA starts turning out lights while people are in the room. I had the tolerance on nmap bumped out to where it would wait 20 minutes before declaring a device away and still it would think people were not at home and turn the tv off on them. Now if the iPhone had a wake on wan type of feature, then nmap would be a better solution. But the iPhone sleep problem has basically eliminated nmap as a solution for me.
what about PIR sensor in every room? There’s no single solution for this. I think it needs a combination of multiple tracking method to determine whether a person is at home or not.
If you’re using keys and not electronic lock, that can be one of the method as well
I agree it’s a combination of things. I’m just trying to get an idea of what others are doing to see if I’ve missed anything. It’s working, I found out about the HappyBubbles tech which may solve at least part of my problem for me and I didn’t know about it before.
I’ve thought about the PIR sensors. I used to play with one when I was playing with the Parallax Propellers a few years back. I need to look into them more, the last time I looked at them the price was prohibitive. I need one that has a long battery life, and works with Wink. I use wink as my hardware integration node and use HA and AppDaemon for my automation tasks.
thats good, but will not distinguish each person (but maybe is not needed after all).
Other point is to find, IMO, relatively inexpensive products, that after first trigger don’t stop for a minute or 2. It should be constantly monitoring
If we could get the happybubbles detectors working with a low voltage battery, and maybe attached to a blank faceplate with a small led light on it that would change state when it detects someone and maybe when the battery is low, depending on how deep it is, it could be attached to the outside of the drywall with only two holes for mollies to hold it on, or actually it could be held on with some 3M tape things. Something like that would be easy to mount and change the battery when needed.
especially if it’s telling us “who” it’s sensing. Otherwise any tasks based on person would get messed up. But then again, you would want these in multiple locations through the house so that may not be as much of an issue.
