I need to know in advance if my garage is already occupied by another car (my wife or my son), without having to travel a fairly long stretch of road unnecessarily. HA would be a great way to know, but I don’t know if there is hardware (laser? Ultrasound? Infrared?), simple to install and compatible with HA, capable of revealing the presence of a car inside the garage and communicating it to HA. There is already a wifi AP in the garage.
Thank you.
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I use a Holyiot Nrf51822 with the iBeacon integration for this, for the old Toyota. My Tesla has a built in iBeacon for this.
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I use Sharp IR distance sensor placed over the parking slot and connected to Fibaro Smart Implant analog input. Sensor generate voltage proportional to distance and Smart Implant reads this voltage to HA. So depending on car presence there is distance difference (either to garage floor or to roof of the car). So same idea as in post #2, but different elements, very simple connections and basically no coding (just binary sensor based on readings from zwave node).
Do you use esphome to detect the signal?
How is the battery life and sensor range?
Nope, just iBeacon integration. I extend with several M5 stack based on usage. Very much sufficient for car detection.
I have used VL53L0X together with esp-01 to detect when I am sitting in a seat that is pointed at projector screen. When I sit on it lights turn off, projector starts and dims pc screen. When I unseat again lights turn on but projector stays on. Been using it for a year or so. I had some reliability issues until recently, I opened the dupont connectors and added more tension to the little spring mechanism with a fingernail.
If I were to do it again, I would go for:
-Wemos d1 mini
-2m usb micro cable
-ac usb adapter
-VL53L0X
-dupont cables
-metal film resistor collection(for i2c pull ups)
I would change that to soldered connections. Dupont connections are fine as development connections but should be switched to soldered connections for reliability (as you found out)
I have an ESP8266-01 in each car. They wake every minute, try to connect to the API. If they connect, then the car is present.
Total cost, about $2 per car.
About the battery. One of the vehicles is rarely driven. Maybe one or two miles a month and the battery stays charged enough to start the engine.