Half-baked idea: phone-pointing control for HA via UWB

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“Maybe you’ve dealt with this too…”

Been struggling with whole-home presence detection lately, so let me vent first, then throw out an idea I’ve been kicking around.

Most people are running either ESP32-based BLE RSSI or millimeter-wave radar sensors. And the pain is real:

  • Bluetooth 2.4GHz signal penetration and reflection is basically black magic—I’m sitting in my bedroom and the living room lights turn on for no reason.
  • Millimeter-wave radar has the sensitivity, but my cat’s midnight zoomies set off every automation. I’ve written countless Node-RED workarounds and still can’t fully filter it out.

After watching Apple’s AirTag “Precision Finding” demo, I started wondering—could you turn a phone into a spatial remote for smart home control?

AirTag’s Precision Finding shows what UWB ranging and direction estimation can do for close-range spatial awareness—ARKit renders that directional info on screen as an arrow and distance readout, so you know exactly which way to look.

That got me thinking: could you apply this kind of capability to smart home control instead of just finding lost keys?

Here’s the approach I’m mulling over:

1. Deploy anchors: Cheapest single-antenna UWB modules will do—they just need to push data to HA over MQTT. Put 3-4 around the living room corners.

2. Phone-side processing: Write a minimal app that taps the phone’s built-in ARKit/ARCore (vision + inertial navigation for pose estimation) and pairs it with the UWB anchors for pure distance measurements.

3. Spatial intersection: The phone calculates its real-time 3D position and pointing ray. When that ray crosses a virtual device coordinate you’ve set up in HA, the corresponding switch or dimmer panel pops up on screen.

No need to buy expensive UWB gateways, and the controlled devices don’t need UWB either—everything already in place keeps working.

Would love to hear your thoughts:

  • Anyone tried anything along these lines? Any obvious holes in this approach?
  • Shooting from the hip here—how does phone-pointing control compare to voice control in terms of where each makes sense?
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You mean like this? https://youtu.be/R8AFXMdouY8

Been waiting for something like this for years. I even have a handful of Quorvo DWM3000 dev boards and modules, which I managed to use for distance measurement between two devices before losing interest, partly because Google hasn’t made APIs available for UWB on Android and wouldn’t for quite some time.

Edit: to be clear, I have no affiliation with the video. It just highlighted quite early what should be available as a kit consisting of devices you buy enough of to achieve the coverage you want. Self-configuring by distance measurement and trilateration between the devices and the phone during the bootstrapping, using the phone’s GPS to place your local positioning constellation absolutely.

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yes please