Detect when I get home / enter my apartment without OwnTracks

#1

I was wondering what’s the best reliable way of detecting when I get home / enter my apartment without having to use OwnTracks on my mobile (battery life is very precious). I heard some people using ble beacons, I have no idea how those work, but is there such a beacon that I could attach to my keychain and have HA detect instantly when I get home? Btw, I’m running HA on Windows.

PS: the ping option, wouldn’t that put too much stress on the server/mobile?
PPS: I’m also running Node-Red, if there’s a better option of running with that instead

#2

I use SNMP to detect when my phone connects to my wifi, triggering me being home.

#3

It depens if your want to know it you or other people.

If you wanna just detect a presence in your home, a motion sensor if enough !!

#4

Detecting when my phone connects to WiFi is what I currently use (with Tasker and Node-Red) but it can be pretty slow. I can be home for a minute or two before it connects, which is already too late to start turning on the lights and so on. Also sometimes the wifi on my mobile can be off

#5

Me :slight_smile: A motion detector would not detect when I leave home, which is something that I would also like to look into sometime soon

#6

Here’s one option. I use two RPi Zero Ws to detect presence in my home (along with Owntracks). One RPi Zero W should be enough to cover a typical apartment.

Newer script: https://github.com/andrewjfreyer/monitor

#7

I’ll have a look, thanks

#8

What is the range on the bluetooth stuff?

#9

I combine Bluetooth, WiFi and app (GPS Logger currently). I tend to find that Bluetooth (which covers almost all the house) is the fastest, though WiFi isn’t usually much behind.

For WiFi I used to use nmap before switching to the router’s component. Nmap was faster at detecting departure, but the router is faster at detecting arrival. Bluetooth generally lags the WiFi detection (because the WiFi coverage extends outside the house, but Bluetooth doesn’t).

#10

+1 for @andrewjfreyer script. Its what I use to detect me coming home, have a pi zero at the front of the house, and picks me up as I am a few feet from the house and can switch on lights, run automation’s for when I get home. Same for leaving, has a minute delay or so for it detecting as away, but thats fine for switching off lights etc.

#11

I’ve not been satisfied with the speed I show up as being home via my Unifi tracker component for a while now but am also unwilling to spend money for BLE beacons and such things.
I recently started adding a few Amazon Dash buttons to the setup (they were only 99cts a pop) and that gave me a new idea - though I haven’t really tried it yet:
As I have the amazon-dash process running on a second PI3 anyway, why not use the same mechanism for quick presence, esp. from not_home => home, detection. If I understand the process correctly, the tool recognizes that the Amazon dash button has been pressed because it registers on my WiFi network with its MAC address. I will set up an action that triggers when my phone is logging in to my WiFi and sets the phone location to home. This should work faster than the Unifi device tracker - which I will keep, of course. The dash process will just boost the logon speed, I hope.

Planning to set this up today and start testing right away.

If that works I only need something that detects me as being away quicker as well. I’m still hoping for something that would be based on my FingBox eventually.

#12

Quick update on the Amazon Dash approach:

It seems to work pretty well for recognizing when I com home - my state now changes from not_home to home within seconds of my phone logging onto my WiFi.
Just need to build up a little more confidence before I can try using it to automatically disarm my alarm through HomeAssistant.