How many esp32 boards for a room?

Hardware
1

My goal is to have a room provide this information:

Presense detection:
pir, bluetooth, mmwave (others?)

Environment detection:
temperature, pressure, humidity, air quality (others?)

My question is - how do I control (limit) the number of SOC’s the room would need?

Getting into HA and am getting rolled by the options. Have configured ESP32 and ESP8266 using ESPHome, ESPresense, (dabbling with Aurdino IDE)

Looking for real world experience of what people have done, want to do the configurations to develop those skill sets

HA is running along with MQTT, Zigbee2MQTT, Bluetooth, using docker on a Debian 13 Server.

Thanks,
Dan

2

placement.
presence sensor function is locations dependent. There are some projects that use wifi signal as presence detection. Currently they seem to have 2 device minimum per area/room but single device is supposedly going to be available. Accuracy is better than PIR from my testing. One project was open source(i did not test) and another was closed (tested and impressed).

a single environment sensor can basically cover a room. it may be slightly effected by location but it is possible to account for differences using adjustment.

3

Hard wired or wireless? Sensor location, power supply, and data transfer are only some of the issues you have to consider.

1 Like
4

In each room of my house I have one esp which does voice, temp, humidity, light , ble proxy and MMwave. Just make sure the position is good and the box designed well and it works without issues.

No need for PIR and MMwave as MMwave can easily do the job of PIR.

5

Thanks Arh,

That helps understanding this issue. Have you picked a specific method for your coding and ha integration? ASPresence, ESPHome, Aurdino, something else?

Any aid in deciding which door to pick is appreciated.

Regards,

Dan

6

Thanks IOT7712,

Anything pi based or camera is using poe. The esp32’s and esp8266’s seem to really beg for wifi/bluetooth.

Can you spare a minute and share what you are using to code and implement?

Regards,

Dan

7

Thanks tmjpugh,

What is the maximun number/type of sensor chips you’ve put on a single esp32/8266?

Regards,

Dan

8

I use esphome as it allows easy integration and you can do just about anything you wish.

2 Likes
9

This is 100% a how big is your room question and what do you want to measure.

For instance if you want a solid BLE mesh, then you’re putting one Bluetooth proxy in a grid approx one per every ~10m. For me that works out to 1-2 per room. If the device I’m building maybe a lamp or a hot tub controller (esphome btw) isn’t heavy on radio already I usually just slap the esphome bt proxy on whatever I’m building so it becomes… Whatever AND another BT proxy. (im up to 12)