How not to trigger one's own alarm?

Mobile Apps
1

Hi there,

I am brand new to home assistant. I have purchased a Reolink camera which I have successfully integrated into Home Assistant and written a script that sends a message to our smartphones when human presence is detected in the garden. That works perfectly. Issue is, it reports also when WE are in the garden, which is disturbing. So I am trying to find a way to prevent this.

I thought about several solutions:

  • I have a wifi router inside the house and one in the garden. So I thought that I could filter alerts out if one of our phones is connected to the router in the garden. Issue is that our smartphone can decide to remain connected to the router inside the house even though the one in the garden is closer and offers better reception. I suppose it only considers switching to the other router when the connection with the one inside the house becomes too bad. I was wondering however if there was a way to ask from a router not the list of devices it is connected to but the list of devices that are visible from it?
  • I also considered the option of using bluetooth. For instance, if I could say that my phone can see (not necessarily be paired with) such bluetooth device that is in the living room, then I can tell for sure that’s not me in the garden. But is there a way to achieve this without installing bluetooth adapters everywhere?
  • I read about the proximity sensor. So I could try to define a zone in my garden. But my feeling is that geolocation is not precise enough to say if I am in the house or just a few meters away in the garden?
  • The last option I am considering is adding a button to my HA interface to disable camera detection for a certain time. But that’s a bit clumsy

That’s as far as I could come. If anybody has any better idea. I am all new to HA, so maybe I missed something obvious. I guess I am not the only person that does not want to trigger is own alarm!!!

2

You could have a look at setting up ESPresense sensors. For example, setting one up in each room (and the garden) will give you fairly precise info where you are. They work using Bluetooth, so you will need your phone on you.

If you go down this path, don’t buy m5stack esp devices like I did - for unknown reasons the distance they report is wildly incorrect, and there doesn’t seem to be any appetite to look into it.

However, there are probably alternatives:

  • With my front door camera I just have an automation where I say “turn the front camera off” to Google and it does so for 30 minutes. This avoids repeat messages where I’m just going back and forth.
  • A door sensor combined with a motion sensor could be used to identify you’re going outside/inside. If you’re outside but still at home, don’t send the notification.
3

Thanks for your answer. The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that adding a button to switch the alarm off for a certain amount of time is the best solution. I have a hope, however, to manage to get my phone to switch to the strongest wifi signal. There seem to be apps for this.