ESpresence - false reads

Configuration
1

Hi
I set up a couple of ESP32’s with ESPresence to detect if I’m in the North or South side of my home (testing). It seemed to work well and show that correctly, however I was away for the holidays and I noticed that there were some false reads where it thought my fitbit was being detected for a couple of hours, every day or so.

Has anyone else had the same issue of fake reads?

2

Example. (red: Office, torquise: Livingroom)
image

3

Did a little digging about it today I have my fitbit set in sensors.yaml as the deviceID, which I don’t think isn’t enough of a filter. I think anyone else with a fitbit the same model/colour will also match.
I’m sure there are plenty of other sd:0x180a out there…

I couldn’t see a way of using the MAC address in the HA config (I’ve raised it as a feature request) so came at it from a different angle until hopefully that’s added.

To filter what the devices are reporting, I went into the ESPrescence config and in the Scanning section I put in the “Known BLE MAC” 13 digit MAC address for my fitbit.
e.g. 123acb321bcax

Save, restart and now in MQTTEplorer I saw a new device reported as: known:123acb321bcax

With that now being reported as my device, I had to amend my sensors.yaml as the sd:0x180a was no longer being passed through as the identifier.

old

- platform: mqtt_room
  name: "CW Fitbit"
  device_id: sd:0x180a
  state_topic: "espresense/rooms"
  timeout: 5
  away_timeout: 120

new

- platform: mqtt_room
  name: "CW Fitbit"
  device_id: known:123acb321bcax
  state_topic: "espresense/rooms"
  timeout: 5
  away_timeout: 120
4

Confirmed.
I opened my ESP32s to listen to all traffic and at the max range (16m) and right enough, another sd:0x180a with a different MAC address popped up on a sensor, so it must belong to the guy in the apartment next along :man_facepalming: