Is it possible to force a scan/update of device trackers?
I’ve seen the device_tracker.see service, but this appears to spoof the device tracker to a particular place/zone.
Basically, I use ping and home assistant android location tracking, my wife only uses ping.
I have a sensor on my front door.
I planned on making the door sensor trigger an update of the device trackers, rather than waiting for when they next update by themselves, this should mean I will be recognised as home within seconds rather than minutes.
Is there a way? or is there any plans to add this service?
I think the other option I have is add a third tracker - Monitor (bluetooth) as this appears to allow me to set it up to manually scan whenever I like.
It’s just the WAF that doesn’t fly with this “I’m not having PIs all around the bloody house!”. After I get a 3D printer I may see if it’s possible to run monitor on ESP32s as these are less bulky and easier to hide!
I have I think 5-6 Pi Zero W distributed around the house, my wife didn’t even notice them for a few months lol. I took the pi, put it on top of the power plug and wrapped some tape around it and put it in an empty socket where you can’t see it immediately. The stability and accuracy is amazing, As soon as I’m close to the front door it already recognizes that I’m at home, no false trigger in 1 year of usage.
Hmmm may be worth trying I guess.
Does it not interfere with Wifi? My Pi3B+ bluetooth used to interfere back when I tried it (admittedly around a year ago).
Also, how does the system deal with someone unplugging one of the PIs? Is it a sort of mesh? or will losing one mean that everything falls down?
The other issue is my wife turns off bluetooth on her phone constantly. So it still wouldn’t solve this…
Not it’s not a mesh and if you remove one of the Pi everything continues to work. Plug it back in and 5 min later it should be up again.
I bought a Nut mini (BLE tracking device) for me and my wife and we attach it to our keys, so we always have them with us when we leave the house. These Nut Minis sends a signal every 3 seconds, the Pis then detect this signal and determine how strong it is. This way I’m even able to see in which room the device is based on the signal strength, but I havent found any usecase for this yet.
Yeah, I think it’s great and rock solid. The only thing I have to watch out is to regularly change the batteries of the NUT minis, but I set a reminder for that, they lasted around 6 months for me.
Let me know in case you need some help or clarifications on the whole bluetooth tracking.
You can also check out my github to see the code or other inspirations: