Of note, when looking for for HA compatible zigbee devices, not everything that’s zibgee actually calls itself zigbee. Sometimes they use a brandname like Hue, or they say that they’re “compatible with Hue”. Most of my Zigbee lighting said that it was ZLL 3. Which is a whole other thing to get into.
Apologies for my delay in replying. It’s been super busy and I’m the only IT person for the whole school. This had to take a bit of a back seat to some other issues.
I’m looking at several uses. The first one is most likely as a way of controlling various consumer TVs which we have Xibo digital signage hooked up to. Those consumer screens do not reliably turn on/off when scheduled, set default inputs etc. We have a couple of Android TV/Google TV based screens as well which I’d like to be able to schedule, but also monitor so that when idle for 5 mins it can launch the Xibo android client. (really Xibo would do well to enable ambient/screensaver mode for their app)
The next is most likely some power-saving things such as being able to turn off all the instant hot water/chiller units at a certain time each day, but vary it based on pulling of calendar data so if the building is being used after hours it stays on until later. (Shelly 3EM Pro in each building has given me a total use of between 7 and 13MWh each month and a lot of that is when nobody is here) A good example is just this last weekend, as the first weekend of the school holidays, nobody was on site at all and we used 176kWh, only 64kWh of that was in the building with the server room)
After that, I’d want to look at HVAC + room presence. The presence could use a combination of mmWave in some areas, and CCTV passed to Frigate for others.
Reason I’m heading down this path is primarily to save money… that we simply do not have the funds to be able to do a normal building management system. We have existing CCTV, and as I mentioned before, Shelly 3EM Pro power monitoring. Nothing else smart at this stage.
I’ve got my first use case. We have a couple of rooms which are used for when special needs students are overstimulated and need a calm environment.
The goal is that I want to easily show if there is someone in each of those rooms because the lights are often off and also if it is via a dashboard it can be shown multiple places.
We have a heap of old windows tablets (Surface Go) which I want to repurpose as digital room signage. I’m intending on 3D printing mounts for a tablet mounted outside each of those rooms. Eventually more info will be displayed on them, but for now we just need to be able to see at a glance if someone is in them.
I recently took delivery of several RoomSense IQ units and I have one communicating with HA. (they’re super impressive) I’m confident they’ll meet the needs of presence detection for this.
I’ve shown the operations manager what I’ve done so far and he’s blown away by the possibilities.
What I’d like some guidance on is how to create a dashboard page with large elements visible depending on what the entity value is. Something like a large green box with VACANT in the middle or a large red box with OCCUPIED depending on the state. I have it currently showing just using a conditional markdown card.
I’ll then embed that page in our digital signage system which uses Xibo.
Picture elements card gives you a good start I believe.
Create a dashboard in panel view and add a Picture elements card and it should give you what you need.
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I would think twice, or at least wait for the firmware to bake a little more, before deploying any of these anywhere. Even at home, mine is demoted to my crap wireless network that sits on an equally inauspicious vlan. I haven’t made any real attempt yet to test it’s usefulness as a presence sensor. Though I really have to hope the talent behind this device lies in the sensors because it sure isn’t in the any of the areas generally considered to be “IT”. Lastly, they sure could have done way better with the 3D printed enclosure. Probably the best avenue would be to just make the file available for anyone to print.
I’m current testing in my office as a proof of concept and the WiFi connection has been flawless since I set it up 4 days ago. It’s connected to a UniFi U6-Enterprise in the same room so I’ll be testing it for the deployed location too which will be on a UniFi nanoHD. My only issue is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to disable the internal AP when it has successfully connected to an AP, nor change the built-in AP password.
The presence side of things is great for our use-case and hasn’t had any false positives or negatives, accurately showing when I’ve been in my office, not showing presence when I’m not here except when the cleaner came in on Saturday.
Totally agree with you on the 3D printed enclosure, will be putting time in to do our own custom ones based on the files they have released.