Internal position tracking with co-ordinates using an iphone and room-assistant

jaburges · December 29, 2020, 12:17pm

Yeah right now RA reports which room you are essentially nearest, which doesn’t help our efforts to get all 3 positions.

I’ve spoken to the dev of RA, and they are looking at providing all values / distances via MQTT by device ID.
This would mean you would have:
Room-assistant/phone1/summary/

{ “node1” : { “distance” : 22 , “status” : “online”}, “node2” : { “distance” : 5, “status” : “online”},
“node3” : { “distance” : 8 , “status” : “online”}

Then you could easily parse those JSON distances and states to node-red for calculation.

However in the meantime I’m using the room-assistant API which works, but means I have to query it from node-red.

Running 2 queries actually:

Hit all node API endpoints /status - and checking there are no errors
Hit 1 of the nodes API that is online and you can get all the distances. To make it a tad more reliable it would make sense to have 1 or 2 nodes more than you need. Then based on the results in theory pick the 3 lowest values (or 4 for 3D trilangulation) (ie the closest to the phone) and drop the ones that may be close to the edge of the range and cause issues Orin a big house not actually see the phone at all.

I had this delusion of grandeur that I’d have some free time over Christmas to test and investigate - my toddler has other plans lol

Oh, re the distance - it’s an arbitrary measure of the signal strength calculation RA uses. I haven’t figured out what the optimum measure is yet so have kept the distance consistent but starting with 1 node and checking the distance in real life (say 10 was the difference in distance from my office door to the office wall) then I used that same scale to workout the other distances in the house. It does take some tinkering and some patience.

I’ve now got 7 ESP32s flashed with the same ibeacon info and testing the Rooms app.
Issue with that is it’s all on the phone so will use the battery more - but the AI part of it allows for training which basically says “I know I’m in this room because I can see these beacons and these strengths)
I haven’t worked out how to apply a similar AI model from node-red so hopefully going to teach myself how to do that over the next few weeks as I prefer the Rpi room-assistant set up, but the AI training process would teach the process which room you are most likely in.

Corey_Johnson · January 1, 2021, 10:14pm

Any idea how to install trilateration into Home Assistant Core with NodeRed or does it need to be an external NodeRed (like you did)?

I found the settings.js.

jaburges · January 3, 2021, 12:50am

I’m not sure you could integrate it with HA, its node.js so assuming it could be called somehow, but that is out of my area of knowledge.

I like to keep things separate (had too many bad experiences attempting to get things working on my HA box and installing a bunch of stuff I didnt understand which created me issues further down the line). Plus I run it in docker, so anything non-persistent would be hosed after an update.

bachoo786 · January 3, 2021, 1:32am

Can’t wait to see the end result looks promising. Would be better if the results can be presented in a visual format.

Well done mate

jaburges · January 3, 2021, 2:19am

thanks - would very much like a visual result (as it would make the scale/calibration better)

That said, i have no clue where to even start to overlay the coordinates on to a floorplan. Been trying to find some existing projects that are similar (as I’m not a code from scratch kind of person, merely an edit/learn/evolve situation). If you know of anything that would make for a good overlay LMK.

My rough plan was to use a 3D floorplan that some use for HA already, and then overlay an icon that moves (but not sure what platform would allow me to pipe in co-ordinates to move the icons around)

bachoo786 · January 3, 2021, 2:35am

Have you checked out Xiaomi Cloud Vacuum Map Extractor and how he was able to get data and show it on a floor plan?

david1 · January 3, 2021, 5:16am

wouldnt it be better to use a smart watch? what if your phone dies…

jaburges · January 3, 2021, 12:08pm

Great idea! I’ll investigate

jaburges · January 3, 2021, 12:10pm

By all means feel free to try it with a smart watch and report back.
I can manage to keep my phone charged as have wireless chargers where I work/sit/sleep.

david1 · January 3, 2021, 7:35pm

do you own an apple watch?

jaburges · January 3, 2021, 7:37pm

I do indeed

david1 · January 3, 2021, 7:37pm

can you try it to see if it works?

jaburges · January 3, 2021, 7:39pm

it wont work for my house, as I’m the only one who owns one,
plus it doesn’t broadcast a BLE address (apple seems to randomize them) - so on the surface it wont work.
The reason this is possible is due to the room-assistant app that broadcasts a consistent BLE address.

If you can find a way around that issue, i’ll try it out

david1 · January 3, 2021, 7:41pm

the room assistant app you use says it supports apple watches

jaburges · January 3, 2021, 8:43pm

The beta app (released by the dev to circumnavigate the random BLE mac broadcast issue i mentioned above) i’m using on the iphone to broadcast BLE, I don’t believe supports running on an apple watch to broadcast its BLE currently.

Bluetooth Classic will work with Apple watch, and in the past I have tried and succeeded with that for detection but not triangulation. I’ve also experienced more interference with 2.4GHz WiFi with BT classic than BLE.

Corey_Johnson · January 3, 2021, 9:37pm

Your post is getting quite a bit of attention

I started over and went through the 3d part… 4 pi nodes, all ethernet connections.
Installed Node-Red on one (pi 4 8gb) and created the flow.

I’m not sure if I missed something or not but I am not getting any sensors from Node-Red into HA although the Person X & Y show to be running. Since this weekend has been a learning experience for me with Node-Red, I assume I did something wrong.

Any thoughts?

I did see this in the node red logs. I really do not understand the http://supervisor/core as i did not enter that anywhere, just the 192.168.30.177 into the flow.

4 Jan 01:33:25 - [info] [server:Home Assistant] Connecting to http://192.168.30.177:8123
4 Jan 01:33:25 - [info] [server:Home Assistant] Connecting to http://supervisor/core
4 Jan 01:33:30 - [info] [server:Home Assistant] Connecting to http://supervisor/core
4 Jan 01:33:30 - [info] [server:Home Assistant] Connecting to http://supervisor/core

jaburges · January 4, 2021, 9:49pm

are you getting values at the sensor?
throw a debug node in one of the sensor nodes place, and set msg to entire msg and trigger the inject node on the left/start.

Then we can debug based on whether you are getting a value

jaburges · January 4, 2021, 9:51pm

also you need to add the node-red integration in the HA UI
Configuration > Integrations > + button (bottom right) - search for node-red.

Corey_Johnson · January 5, 2021, 1:29am

well crap… I had 2 other 'node-red’s installed but not that last one… smh.

Doing that got your first example running.

Now back to the 3D version…

I get what appears to be a good message from the switch:

"payload":{"attributes":{"distance":0.4,"lastUpdatedAt":"2021-01-05T01:18:17.664Z"},"id":"bluetooth-classic-a8-34-6a-87-6b-91","name":"a8:34:6a:87:6b:91 Room Presence","distributed":true,"distances":{"sanctumBT":{"lastUpdatedAt":"2021-01-05T01:17:53.464Z","distance":21.3,"outOfRange":false},"lrBT":{"lastUpdatedAt":"2021-01-05T00:50:22.601Z","distance":5.9,"outOfRange":false},"lr2BT":{"lastUpdatedAt":"2021-01-05T01:18:17.664Z","distance":0.4,"outOfRange":false},"officeBT":{"lastUpdatedAt":"2021-01-05T01:18:22.004Z","distance":6.8,"outOfRange":false}},"timeout":40,"state":"lr2BT"},"statusCode":200,"headers":{"x-powered-by":"Express","content-type":"application/json; charset=utf-8","content-length":"2513","etag":"W/\"9d1-w1aHnT1BQNmLh6bm5zq3ebfp7MA\"","date":"Tue, 05 Jan 2021 01:18:32 GMT","connection":"close","x-node-red-request-node":"7f20469b"},"responseUrl":"http://192.168.30.98:6415/entities","redirectList":[],"parts":{"id":"ed8a1a0f.086018","type":"array","count":9,"len":1,"index":8},"_msgid":"9f9e2faf.22191"}

If I go to the 1st function after the switch, I get:

TypeError: Cannot read property 'distance' of undefined

const trilat = global.get('lmTrilateration3d');
 
// 3D
// At least 4 beacons position and distance to locate 3D, if have only 3 beacons, z can not calculate then replace by undefined
var input3D = { data: [
//         X       Y       Z                  R
    [      10,     55,     100,   msg.payload.distances.lr2BT.distance],
    [    100,    80,      10,   msg.payload.distances.lrBT.distance],
    [    90,    100,      100,   msg.payload.distances.officeBT.distance],
    [     55,   30,        10,   msg.payload.distances.sanctum2BT.distance]
]};
msg.payload = trilat.locate3D(input3D);
return msg;

I have the trilateration package installed and referenced in the pi (running node-red).

pi@lr2BT:~/.node-red $ npm install lm-trilateration3d
+ [email protected]
updated 1 package and audited 78 packages in 3.363s

19 packages are looking for funding
  run `npm fund` for details

found 0 vulnerabilities

    //    global.get("os")
    functionGlobalContext: {
        trilateration:require('trilateration'),
        lmtrilateration3d:require('lm-trilateration3d')
        // os:require('os'),
        // jfive:require("johnny-five"),
        // j5board:require("johnny-five").Board({repl:false})
    },
    //

jaburges · January 5, 2021, 2:48am

on first glance it looks like you are only getting SanctumBT not Sanctum2BT