So I had set up HA with Alarm on my gf’s old house. The problem was she would more often than not forget to set it, even if she would get a telegram message reminding her no one was home and the Alarm was off. Then the few times she would turn on the Alarm she would forget to turn it off when she got home. Her neighbors got a bit upset with her as the siren was pretty loud and would take her a few seconds to pull cell phone out, unlock her phone, open the app, and enter code.
So her ask this time around is to have sortha like an alarm, but that it turns on/off by itself. I am using the term “alarm” very loosely here. The way our house is setup, we only have two main ways for intruders to come in. First would be through the back fence/wall. I have that part under control as we rarely climb that wall ourselves. I plan to set up sprinkler system, siren, motion detectors, etc. So that part would “always” stay “on” regardless if we are home or not. Few times I need to climb the wall I can just turn the automation off while I do what I need to do.
The other way intruders could come in is through the main front door, or the side door in the front of the house that leads to the yard. And that is where I need to figure out best way for HA to know someone in the household is the one getting in, vs and intruder.
At one point I was thinking via double take with facial recognition, but soon found out that is not reliable at all. Think main problem is that I am using 1080 cameras, and even though they end up about 4 to 5 feet from peoples face the quality doesn’t seem to be good enough for it to get a good scan. Plan on getting a 4k camera soon, and dig more into Double Take facial recognition see if it can become reliable enough in the future.
Currently I am playing with Bermuda Trilangulation using ESP BLE Proxies. However there seems to be many variables invovled there. In order to get it to somewhat work I have to turn the bluetooth transmit power relatively high, which drains the battery not terrifyingly fast, but enough to notice the difference. My gf often has her cell phone with less than 20% so adding the BLE trasmitter to it at high levels not the best option. Plus even with higher transmit power it doesn’t seem to be stable enough. Haven’t done much testing, but the 4 to 5 times I’ve walked around the sensor set by the curb/sidewalk I don’t get clean results. For example today, I walked to/from the BLE Proxy about 10 times, and about 7 or 8 times it did show me at the right location, but a few times while showing me the right location it went to “unkown”. Two or three times I went from kitchen to the outside, and after getting out of range of kitchen it showed me unknown, and even if I walked right next to the senor on the curb it didn’t pick me up until I turned bluetooth off on my phone then back on.
Now I am contemplating a 3rd option. Not sure if it works for all android phones or not, but for our 3 phones in the household when they connect the router assigns them a static IP. Thinking of maybe using the “ping” method, maybe once every 30 seconds to see the status of the phones. The idea would be to set up automation that when ping goes from no reply to reply, to turn off door automations for 3 minutes. I would make sure there is strong wifi connection at the curb to insure cell phones would connect promptly as we walk by. Haven’t tested this yet, so no idea of how reliable it might be.
Could you guys suggest a better approach?
I don’t have my sirens hooked up yet. At the moment I have mmWave sensors in the front yard, and when someone walks into the porch area a speaker says “Hello, we are letting them know you are here, please wait”, then Alexa announces inside that someone is at the front door, then a picture is sent to us via whatsapp, followed by a short video. However this happens even when “we” come home. The goal would be that when of us comes in, the automation wouldn’t trigger, but when someone not form the household walks up the automation does trigger.
I do have it set up so what when we open the door to leave the house, the automation turns off. so we don’t get notified someone is at the door when in fact we are leaving the house.