Hi everyone,
I’ve been playing with ESP32’s this year and I just learned about ESPHome and Home Assistant yesterday! There are a lot of topics in these forums that I wish knew about earlier!
A friend and I make a company integrating ESP32’s into pressure sensitive floor mats to automate stuff in our house and do data collection. And I was curious if people here think a pressure sensitive floor mat with an ESP32 integrated is a good idea.
The Kickstarter is focused on a simple plug-and-play use case of controlling a Bluetooth wall socket switch, but it does have a fully functional ESP32 that can be reprogrammed to run ESPHome and connect to Home Assistant.
Sorry for the self-promotion, but I am genuinely interested in learning what people here think about the idea.
First I am subtracting $10 for making me watch the video
This is an excellent start.
Does the mat uses capacitance or resistance?
Can you determine the weight?
Can you determine the size of the impression on the mat?
can you give coordinates where the user stepped on the mat? this could be updated in two entities (in Home Assistant aka HA lingo) as X, Y coordinates.
We’ve played around with different size grids, but it’s more development time and it adds complexity. Without knowing an exact use case, we create our current version, and it is basically one large resistive button.
For the grid mats we have made, yes we can define the X, Y coordinates.
Thanks for the tips on the BLE and HA BLE radio, I’ll look into them more.
And interesting, to know the weight measurement would be a deal breaker.
In it’s current form if you put it at a doorway you could identify the different between pets (under 25 lb.) and a human - by assuming a max-sensor-read was a human walking across it and then lower sensor reads would be the weight for each animal.
Remember that the mat does not need to make the distinction between various weights.
I would venture that exposing the generated value on weight is way more useful and way more “open” than forcing the logic into your system.
That is, I rather have an entity that the value is updated to “12” for a range of 0-255, than some convoluted mechanism in your mat that determines that 12 falls into a cat category, therefore the entity is updated to “cat” or “1”, while a moose will be “moose” or “5”. Let HA do the logic. Give me data so HA and I can make it into actionable information.
Looks interesting to me, but what worries me more is consistency. Will the mat be big enough so it won’t fail to see the person. And if it will survive high heels. And how is it powered?
Personally my whole hallway carpet is a floor mat. Will there be a sensor only version you can place under that?
From this link “… a man’s walking stride length is 30 inches,… a woman’s average stride length is 26.4 inches.”
Because of the size of our machines we plan to make our mats the smallest size for a typical front door mat (~22in x ~16in). We also assumed people would use them at counter and in doorways, not hallways. Based on the step length link above, if you put one in a hallway there is a chance someone could step over it, but if you had two next to each other then you wouldn’t miss anyone (unless they’re really tall).
In our lab tests it survives high heels, the sensor is made of plastic and conductive threads, so as long as you don’t cut it it’ll keep working.
The brain is an ESP32, so any power supply that can power an ESP32 works. We’re giving people a USB cable and USB wall charger so the mat can be continuously powered, but it can work off of any USB power supply.
We hadn’t planned a sensor only version because the sensor needs to have a top and bottom to protect the conductive threads from being exposed. It should be possible to take the sensor out of the mat and protect it with a thinner top and bottom piece if you wanted to make is super thin. The sensor itself is about 3-4mm thick.
This reminds me of the mats we use in hospital to detect when confused people get up and walk about and are at risk of falls. I know some people have set up HA in elderly relatives homes to help keep them safe. The mat would have to not be a trip hazard itself.
That’s a great idea! We thought about something like that, but didn’t know anyone to get an “in” into that market. And we definitely don’t want the mat to be a trip hazard .
Just bought 12 of these, they look fantastic! Just came on here to tell people about them after seeing a Meta post about this and found you’d already started a post.
Raymond has a really solid rep in the R&D space and really looking forward to getting my hands on his new product! Cant wait to get them under existing mats and in all sorts of different places to see what I can do with them.
As long as the mat isn’t completely submerged in a pool of water it should be fine. We’re planning to make the mats weatherproof by sealing the sensor area and ESP32 from the elements, so you can use it outdoors at Halloween without any concern .
Our current plan to have each mat’s cable detachable so that people can use their own preferred length of USB cable (instead of the 10’ cord that comes with it).
All that said, if you plug in a wet USB into the mat I could foresee the electronics being sad about that .
for blatantly self-promoting in this forum and the reddit that I just joined, but the best way to describe what we’re doing is sharing our Kickstarter that has all the details: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/appliedsensorcorp/trampletek-blue-the-smart-textile-sensor-floor-mat
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