"is the public side of my driveway clear" device?

Hardware
1

Hi everybody,

I am looking for a very specific type of hardware that ideally works with Home Assistant (ESPHome, zigbee2mqtt; ideally not z-wave).

Let me explain the situation:

I have a gated driveway that connects to a public road. The gate is solid, so no see-through. Also, sometimes I need to assists somebody at unpredictable times (sometimes not for a week, sometimes twice a day). This needs to happen relatively quickly, so when I need to drive, I need to open the gate, get in my car, and drive.

Here in Germany, you are not allowed to point your security cameras at public ground (as far as I know). There is a shop on the opposite site of the road (opposite from my gate). While it is illegal to block driveways, people park there on a regular base to go to this shop. It is always different people.

A “please don’t block the driveway” sign doesn’t help. While I try and talk to people when they park there (some understand, some be like “I’ll just be 5 minutes, don’t be so uptight!”), since it is always different people, this doesn’t help. Those that understand (hopefully) won’t park there again, others don’t care - but most are just random people who park there once. Once for them, multiple times a day, is countless times for me.

So I cannot monitor this space via camera because it would be illegal. I don’t have reason to surveil this area, so I must not. I doubt whoever is in charge of this will care that I might sometimes be in a hurry to get out of my driveway, so I do not want to risk getting in trouble for using a camera there.

The reason I want to do this is that I could have Home Assistant alert me as soon as a car parks there (for x seconds/minutes), then I could go outside and ask whoever parked there to use on of the many - usually unoccupied - parking spaces right around the area. It’s not like they even have to block my gate, the shop most people go to has multiple spots for customers.

So this way, I’d always have a heads up that I might not be able to leave through my driveway before I’d actually have to, and could act accordingly.

Finally, my question

Is there a “plug and play” kind of device I could purchase and mount to my gate in order to know whether or not somebody is blocking my gate?

I have thought of:

Downside: I’d have to build this myself. While I already use the Ultrasonic Sensor to measure the level of my rainwater tanks (so I know how it works), I wouldn’t know how to securely mount and power this. Couldn’t be on the outside of my gate, because it could just be ripped off / unplugged (and yes! People get very touchy when you ask them not to inconvenience you by not breaking the law, so I could imagine somebody doing this!!).

Thoughts: I don’t have experience with this. Could I mount it on the inside (facing my property) side of my (metal) gate and still detect what’s going on on the other side (facing the public road, or rather, the direct outside of my gate)? And would I be able to “missuse” it to actually measure occupancy - not just motion?

Likely downside: I’d need at the very least two of these to determine whether somebody actually parks there. Likely it’d even have to be four at least, two per each side of the gate to avoid false positives.

What do you suggest? Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a “sensible” solution… I mean, people simply respecting the area as a non-parking area, or at least talking sense into them (not possible because it is not just one or two people doing this). I need some kind of technical solution so I can at least be on alert that the driveway might be blocked once again before I actually might need to leave in a hurry.

I could just block the driveway myself, meaning that I’d park my car outside, in front of the gate. I have done this before. Since it’s the way to my property, nobody will get me in trouble if I do this. However, I’d prefer to park on my property instead of on the road - so this is a workaround I’d like to avoid.

Any technical solution you can recommend? Thank you in advance for your ideas :slight_smile:

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3

I was gonna recommend parking cones ore something you may easily remove that discourages parking in that spot. If other spaces are available i expect any inconvenience that requires thought will lead ti person parking in easier space

4

If the laws in Germany are like many in the US (including where I live) then pointing cameras AT certain things (in my case private property not belonging to me) is prohibited, but if it’s pointed at your own property and the street is in the periphery then that’s acceptable since it’s not the primary target and only a bit of “incidental overlap” (actually intentional but if the camera eye is not pointed at the forbidden thing that is impossible to prove or even know). I use this same method to monitor dogs barking around my property. My cameras are pointed into my own yard, but the peripheral can see enough into neighboring lawns to be of use to me.

You could, and I do this with some neighbors, get an agreement with the store to scan their property on your camera sweeps as an added security measure for them. I do this for neighbors across the access road and they appreciate it and have even asked for footage when something has happened - in two cases insurance claims that would not have been paid otherwise.

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Thanks everybody for your input :slight_smile:

The street in front of my driveway / gate is public property. If I understand correctly, you must not park there (= not stay for longer than 3 minutes while inside the car, nor any amount of time if leaving the vehicle) because it is the passage from the public road to my property.

But it is still public property, so I cannot put cones or these cool fake spikes there, because I don’t own the public part of the road (where these people park; they don’t park on my property, just on public property in front of it).

@CO_4X4 that sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately, in this case, that is out of the question. The shop owner got mad at me for telling his (potential) customers to literally park anywhere else, so we are not on speaking terms any longer. He has six parking spots in front of his store (which are usually free at all times!!) and a huge area behind his shop where people can park, yet he doesn’t see anything wrong with people blocking my driveway just so that they can walk 5 steps instead of 25 when entering the store.

I don’t really understand this, but is has already gotten to the point where I mounted a camera aimed at my gate in a way similar to what you have described: it was filming my gate, but “accidentally” also that part of the public road that I am talking about. He actually took multiple photos of my camera, so I just took it down.

As far as I know -and I could be wrong, of course-, the state will tolerate people aiming their security cameras at public property, but any individual can file a civil law suite if they feel that any camera invades their privacy. I did not want to go there. It is bad enough that there is tension like this already. Especially over nothing (it’s not like this is a major city and I own one of 20 desperately needed parking lots; there is free and available parking all around, people just don’t seem to care).

Oh well. I’ll stick with parking my car outside for now. This way, I can at least be sure to be available when I am needed on short notice. But if anybody else has ideas, please let me know. As long as they do not require me to place/mount/install anything on public property, it has to be on my property, just monitoring what’s going on right in front of it.

6

It may be psychology will be easier to use here than technology. Some ideas:

  1. Paint a large pair of eyes on your gate. There have been studies which suggest people (and animals) behave differently when they “sense” that someone is watching. Just the presence of a large pair of cartoon eyes has been shown to make people “feel” watched and reduce unwanted behavior.

  2. Put a large, very visible fake camera pointing at the spot. Put it as close to the “No Parking” sign as possible, or hang your own sign right above or below it. Make sure you can easily prove to the authorities that it’s an empty shell, not a real camera, when they show up asking questions.

[Edit: I just thought of another one:]

  1. Sometimes the wording of the sign makes all the difference. I’ve seen “No Parking” signs ignored, but if they also say “Active Driveway” it seems to have more impact. Might be worth a shot.
2 Likes
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I sadly don’t have any ideas about how to solve the OPs dilemma. I just wanted to say that these fake rubber spikes are absolutely genius ! It’s one of these things you didn’t know you needed until you see it. And now I want them :slight_smile: Long driveway, multiple ‘private property, do not enter’ signs don’t do anything, a visible camera helps a little but not that much either… Some people are just genuinely stupid I guess. Spikes may help though !

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I wish I could do this. The law (at least here in Germany) doesn’t differentiate between real and fake cameras. If somebody feels this camera is “an invasion of personal privacy”, they can file a public law suite. So a fake camera that doesn’t have the ability to record might be illegal, as soon as somebody complains about it.

The eyes thing on the other hand an approach I will definitely look into.

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That’s too bad the law is written that way. I suppose I understand why. But it seems like it encourages people to go the other way, and use those tiny, hidden cameras I see advertised on line. If people don’t know they can’t complain! Obviously I wouldn’t recommend that. It’s not worth the risk.

But it gets me thinking. Surely a simple photosensor is legal. It can’t be against the law to have a sensor which turns on a light at dusk. Or detects when a person or car passes the sensor. So the solution is to focus the sensor so it only detects a change in brightness at a specific spot. Maybe using a lens in a tube.

I have no idea why this thread interests me. I guess I just like difficult problems. And the legal aspect is fascinating. When does a photo become a photo? One pixel is just a light sensor. Lots of them and you can see shapes. Even more and you can identify individuals. I wonder where the law draws the line.

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Depending on the distance you have to cover some ToF sensors (paired with esp/picow) might be a option to detect “obstacles” some meters in front of your gate. :straight_ruler:

While the longer range (4m?) vl53l1x is not (yet) supported in esphome (stable) some PR or custom component which supports them is floating around if I remember right. :thinking:

Other than (fake) cameras that shouldn’t introduce any problems regarding privacy laws or regulation. :man_judge:

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Can’t you simply petition your city to give you some relief? If they can, and do, block your driveway and trap you on your property then it seems like you have a very legitimate case to get variances to the current laws to allow cameras or cones or signs on that spot as it appears as though you have just as much right to keep your entry clear as they do to not being monitored. If the problem and the solution are both technically illegal then one has to give and it seems like a persons inconvenience is less than that of someone who needs to be able to leave their property.

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Exactly! I haven’t found a fitting hidden camera yet, and - of course - I wouldn’t I would never do this, anyway :wink: , but I could see many people resorting to this. (my idea would be a USB camera like this connected to a raspberry pi, in theory only, of course; but I guess there isn’t that much use for this type of camera with USB connectivity and outdoor case/housing).

Thank you. That’s what I was thinking about, but I only thought of the ultrasonic variant of these. Which I did not really want to use. The TOF10120 looks perfect, but I ordered a handful of VL53L0X to start with (4 pieces including shipping for the price of two of the other sensor without shipping).

I hope its 2 meters should be sufficient. My initial thought was to mount them on top of my gate so that they’d be high enough to not catch the eye of anybody walking right by… if this doesn’t work, I might have to mount them inside the gate, which I’d really like to avoid.

Unfortunately, no. This is how things usually go…

Somebody parks there. Ideally, I don’t even notice because they just go to the store and are gone after a few minutes. Sometimes, people just park there and go elsewhere, so they might stay for longer times…

If I need to leave (or am arriving and want/need to use this area to enter my property), I might have the chance to ask people to leave (if they are just arriving or they see my car from the store).

But let’s say somebody has been parking there for an hour, I didn’t notice, and need to leave. Then there is nothing I can do but wait for them. I could have them towed, but (a) I would have to cover the costs and open a civil law suite to get reimbursed and (b) if they return and leave while the tow truck was still on the way, I’d have to pay the driver for coming here - without the chance of getting reimbursed at all. While this would likely teach people a lesson, I simply don’t do it because of the risk of not getting my money back.

I can also inform the city. They want a photo, date, time / duration of blocking my driveway, and then they charge the registrant of the car some small penalty fee (I believe it is 10 or 15 EUR). While this also teaches people a lesson, it does not help me. If I need to leave, I need to leave. Them having to pay a fine does not help me there, and it’s not like I’d get the money - the city does (otherwise I could just always call a cab :smiley: ). I don’t do this often. If people park here repeatedly, or if they are rude when I ask them to leave, I’ll do it. But even though I am right to do so, I feel bad about sometimes.

Now, it’s been about 14 years since I had to pass my driving exam, but I believe that they taught us that you must not park anywhere where the sidewalk (pavement???) is lowered to street level (or something like this), because it indicates that it is some sort of gateway between public road and private property. So a sign, painted eyeballs, or just anything else, should simply not be necessary. But even when they were there (I’ve had multiple signs right on my gate over the years), people did not seem to care.

I thought of something like “By parking here, you agree to paying a EUR 15,00 fine to the city. Thank you for increasing their budget”.

Hopefully the TOF sensor thing will work. I’ll create an alarm if at least two sensors (planning on installing all four) register that somebody likely parks there, so then somebody can walk outside right away and see if there is a way to make people park elsewhere… Until the sensors arrive, I’ll continue to park in front of my own driveway on the public road. Really annoying, but the only solution that works for sure.

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Didn’t read the whole thing, but would a sign of “Do not block emergency exit”, or something like that, hanging on the gate, work for you?

People might not care about your driveway, but maybe we reword a bit, and frame it as an “emergency exit”, then it would be enough to make some difference?

Because it is indeed a concern: when a fire or something happens, and then the fire engine or ambulance would want to come in, and then somebody’s car is blocking the entrance… these kinds of little delays could be live or death, right?

14

That is a really good point about firefighters / ambulances, etc.

In general, I’d say they could still get to my house without using the driveway. Perhaps driveway is not even the correct word for what I have? It’s not like some cool “private road” sort of driveway like I’ve seen in the US, where you actually drive up to somebody’s house. It is just a couple of meters. Sorry for the confusion, if driveway wasn’t the right term here.

This is what it looks like

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(“My Street” isn’t private property; it’s the public road)

I can only guess (and hope!!) that, if there was a fire or other kind of emergency, they’d be able to reach the house just fine, even if some genius decides to park in front of the gate.

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Would it be possible to just extend that white pattern painted in the road? If you’re in the Northern hemisphere, days are getting longer right now. You might find a quiet time early in the morning when you could finish the job before anyone noticed. Ask for forgiveness later.

And yes, that’s a driveway. It looks about the same size as mine. We don’t all live in mansions at the end of long driveways here in the US.

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I love the idea. But don’t dare to. I have reported people parking there often enough for the city to pick me as suspect number 1 if this happened.

Haha, sorry, I know. Didn’t mean it like that. I thought that there was perhaps another word for this kind of driveway (the word sounds so fancy to me, like, when I hear it, I think of these mansion-type driveways). The only times I drove / parked myself in such a driveway in the US, the person whose car / driveway it was always just called it “the spot”.

As we currently consider moving in the somewhat foreseeable future, I’ll use the ToF once they arrive, and block my own driveway until then. If the move will become a thing, I’ll try real hard to just not let me bother this until we’re gone. If we stay, I’ll definitely keep the line-extension idea in mind. Perhaps I need to be at city hall in person some day and some unknown third party will take care of that while I am there, so it couldn’t have been me… who knows :wink:

17

Good luck whichever way things go! It’s been fun working out solutions, anyway.

It’s funny how different words can have different connotations, even if they mean the same thing. Nobody at my “boat club” would consider calling it a “yacht club.” It’s true that a yacht is just any privately-owned boat, but for some reason it sounds too “fancy” for us.

I’m sure driveway has the same connotation somewhere. But where I live it’s just any place you can drive off the street to park to access your house.

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18

I received the VL53L0X recently and tried a test ESPHome.

Below is the code and how a wired things, plus a (bad) photo.

At first, I had only connect VL53L0x1 and everything worked (without id, address, and enable_pin). According to the docs, I needed to add address and enable_pin when using more than one of those sensors, which I did.

VL53L0x2 will always time out:

[08:48:44][I][app:029]: Running through setup()...
[08:48:44][I][i2c.arduino:183]: Performing I2C bus recovery
[08:48:44][D][vl53l0x:034]: 'VL53L0x1' - setup BEGIN
[08:48:44][D][vl53l0x:258]: 'VL53L0x1' - setup END
[08:48:44][D][vl53l0x:034]: 'VL53L0x2' - setup BEGIN
[08:48:44][E][vl53l0x:092]: 'VL53L0x2' - setup timeout
[08:48:44][E][component:113]: Component vl53l0x.sensor was marked as failed.

In Home Assistant, it looks like this

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Since I ordered 4 of these, anyway, I just replaced the original one that I here refer to as VL53L0x2 with a new sensor as to assure that the sensor itself wasn’t damaged or I badly soldered it. But this error occurs with the new sensor as well as the old.

As you can see in the code below, I have timeout: 200us and update_interval: 500ms; I thought this might be too quick to handle, but even with update_interval: 30s and completely removing timeout, only the first sensor will work.

I have always run into issues with GPIOs on ESP32 and ESP8266, so I changed VL02 XSHUT to GPIO 23, GPIO 21 and GPIO 34, just to test random other GPIOs (in case that GPIO 17 was perhaps a special PIN that simply wouldn’t work with this) - but that didn’t change anything.

I’d like / need to connect all four sensors to this board ideally. Of course, I could use multiple ESPs, but I believe this should all work with one board, right?

What do you think causes this error / timeout here?

(bb is breadboard; I used the +- on one side for 5V and GND, and the one on the other side for SDA and SCL; those +- panes are not physically connected, so they cannot short each others)

SOURCE PIN DEST. PIN
ESP32
ESP32 V5 5V bb
ESP32 GND GND bb
ESP32 21 i²c bb SDA
ESP32 22 i²c bb SCL
VL53L0x1
VL01 VIN 5V bb
VL01 GND GND bb
VL01 SCL bb SCL
VL01 SDA bb SDA
VL01 XSHUT ESP32 19
VL53L0x2
VL02 VIN 5V bb
VL02 GND GND bb
VL02 SCL bb SCL
VL02 SDA bb SDA
VL02 XSHUT ESP32 17 
substitutions:
# Angleichen
  api_reboot_timeout: 2min
  esp_board: nodemcu-32s
  esp_frame: arduino
  esphome_friendly: "Test/ESP32/Einfahrtstor"
  esphome_name: "einfahrtstor"
  loglevel: DEBUG # NONE / ERROR / WARN / INFO / DEBUG (Default) / VERBOSE / VERY_VERBOSE
  pw_accesspoint: "verysecure"
  pw_encryption_key: "muchsafe"
  wifi_address: 10.0.20.157
  #wifi_address: "${esphome_name}.${wifi_domain}"
  #wifi_domain: "van"
  wifi_power: NONE # NONE (ESP8266) / LIGHT (default ESP32) / HIGH
  wifi_reboot_timeout: 2min
# Secrets
  loc_elevation: !secret loc_elevation
  loc_latitude: !secret loc_latitude
  loc_longitude: !secret loc_longitude
  loc_radius: !secret loc_radius
  mqtt_broker: !secret mqtt_broker
  mqtt_password: !secret mqtt_password
  mqtt_port: !secret mqtt_port
  mqtt_username: !secret mqtt_username
  srv_internal: "true"
  srv_pass: !secret srv_pass
  srv_port: !secret srv_port
  srv_user: !secret srv_user
  wifi_backup_password: !secret wi_pass_1
  wifi_backup_ssid: !secret wi_ssid_1
  wifi_password: !secret wi_pass
  wifi_ssid: !secret wi_ssid
#--------------------------------------------------------------------#
#                              DEFAULTS                              #
#--------------------------------------------------------------------#
# ----------------------- entweder / oder ----------------------------
#
# esp8266:
#   board: $esp_board
esp32:
 board: $esp_board

bluetooth_proxy:
  active: true
esp32_ble_tracker:
# --------------------------------------------------------------------
esphome:
  name: $esphome_name
  friendly_name: $esphome_friendly


logger:
  level: $loglevel

api:
  encryption:
    key: $pw_encryption_key
  reboot_timeout: $api_reboot_timeout

ota:
  password: $pw_ota

wifi:
  networks:
    - ssid: $wifi_ssid
      password: $wifi_password
    - ssid: $wifi_backup_ssid
      password: $wifi_backup_password
  reboot_timeout: $wifi_reboot_timeout
  use_address: $wifi_address
  ap:
    password: $pw_accesspoint
    ssid: "${esphome_name} Hotspot"
captive_portal:

web_server:
  port: $srv_port
  auth:
    username: $srv_user
    password: $srv_pass
  include_internal: $srv_internal
  version: 2
#--------------------------------------------------------------------#
switch:
  - platform: restart
    name: "${esphome_friendly} Restart (Normal)"
  - platform: safe_mode
    name: "${esphome_friendly} Restart (Safe Mode)"
# -------------------------------------------------------------------
sensor:
  - platform: vl53l0x
    name: "VL53L0x1"
    id: distance1
    address: 0x41
    enable_pin: 19
    long_range: true
    timeout: 200us
    update_interval: 500ms
    unit_of_measurement: "m"
  - platform: vl53l0x
    name: "VL53L0x2"
    id: distance2
    address: 0x42
    enable_pin: 17
    long_range: true
    timeout: 200us
    update_interval: 500ms
    unit_of_measurement: "m"

i2c:
  sda: 21
  scl: 22
  scan: true
  id: myi2c

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19

Interesting thread…

Multiple i2c devices need different addresses. This from Arduino Code | Adafruit VL53L0X Time of Flight Micro-LIDAR Distance Sensor Breakout | Adafruit Learning System

“The VL53L0X has a default I2C address of 0x29!

You can change it, but only in software. That means you have to wire the SHUTDOWN pin and hold all but one sensor in reset while you reconfigure one sensor at a time”

Good luck.

20

Read further down the same link.

l# Connecting Multiple Sensors

I2C only allows one address-per-device so you have to make sure each I2C device has a unique address. The default address for the VL53L0X is 0x29but you can change this in software.

To set the new address you can do it one of two ways. During initialization, instead of calling lox.begin(), call lox.begin(0x30) to set the address to 0x30. Or you can, later, call lox.setAddress(0x30) at any time.

The good news is its easy to change, the annoying part is each other sensor has to be in shutdown. You can shutdown each sensor by wiring up to the XSHUT pin to a microcontroller pin. Then perform something like this pseudo-code:

  1. Reset all sensors by setting all of their XSHUT pins low for delay(10), then set all XSHUT high to bring out of reset
  2. Keep sensor #1 awake by keeping XSHUT pin high
  3. Put all other sensors into shutdown by pulling XSHUT pins low
  4. Initialize sensor #1 with lox.begin(new_i2c_address) Pick any number but 0x29 and it must be under 0x7F. Going with 0x30 to 0x3F is probably OK.
  5. Keep sensor #1 awake, and now bring sensor #2 out of reset by setting its XSHUT pin high.
  6. Initialize sensor #2 with lox.begin(new_i2c_address) Pick any number but 0x29 and whatever you set the first sensor to
  7. Repeat for each sensor, turning each one on, setting a unique address.

Note you must do this every time you turn on the power, the addresses are not permanent!“