A yes.
B not necessarily
C yes.
Thanks for the info and the quick reply, appreciated.
On point B are there many pitfalls? Iām guessing range is going to be a killer maybe?
I never thought detecting a person would be so hard 
Well this isnāt going well - seems I have no BlueTooth adapter in my HA server 
Can anyone recommend a BT dongle that will work?
Look up esp32 Bluetooth proxies. BLE is great when you need to position a station in space and it needs a BLE mesh to detect the beacons.
No itās not simple. Not by a long shot, you will need to temper your expectations.
The āmost accurateā will be if you turn off the rotating ip addr for your access points for that phone and assign that unit a static ip. Most network gear will pick up immediately and youāll have a lag of detection for disconnecting by about 5-15 minutes depending on your gear.
Everything else is just adding to that signal you seem to be bouncing back and forth trying to find āperfectā sorry doesnāt exist. Youāll be looking for āgood enoughā
Ok, iāll take āgood enoughā
So i need to run an ESP32 as proxy and not plug in a BT dongle?
I donāt have access points, just the main router which covers my area pretty well.
Any further help much appreciated - you can tell iām stabbing in the dark here lol
Yes you are.
You need to first start by stating what is acceptable. What you do or do not have available and what is allowed. (itās a girlfriend and I canāt install software on her phone. Or itās my kid and Iām being draconian they do what I say)
You want what kind of presence - just home not home or room by room.
Do you have control of the phone. Can you install anything. What exactly is your network gear etc (yes I know itās up there hear me out)
Reason.
People donāt like to be tracked. Vendors spent a lot of time making sure people canāt be tracked. Youāre fighting THAT
THE #1 Defense for an iPhone and android device is rotating Mac addresses for Bluetooth and wifi (sound familiar?) each keeps a library of 10-12 macs and rotates through. To combat that you can. Turn off the rotating key (my preference if I have control over it) by telling the wifi setting for your network on that device to not mask your ip then assign a static to that endpoint. Your home and away are now at the mercy of how well that works. Either look at your router integration to tell you (unifi does this natively(or setup a ping integration to ping that endpoint. Thatās your starter device. If you can add companion app thatās another signal. BLE yet another.
Based on your stated issue above Iām turning off the rotating ip addr and tracking the node on my network.
WOW, I will admit that Iām almost at the āgive upā point on this really, its just looking messy at present TBH.
My setup - one AX1500 router, phones a mix of Apple/Android. No possibility to install any app on any phone apart from mine sadly. I can assign static IPās of course, on my router. I could likely tweak the network settigs on the phones if it only related to my network?
My goal is purely for home presence, not tracking and not room by room, just the home area in general.
Yes itās in where you setup wifi for that phone to connect to your wifi.
I have three networks one is guest if any ip address is assigned off that network I send a guest signal high which also sets presence for a āguestā person in HA (makes the zone math work, any guest connects to wifi effectively throws my home into guest mode)
For friends I tell them to connect to a specific network and I set It up for them and turn off the rotating privacy for that network. I also show them what Iām doing and why << this gives me thier ip on my networkā¦ This is the tracking item.
My wife and kids I - pwn the device. I know what room itās in via BLE on top of everything else. (so all that plus the BLE Bluetooth proxies probably two ish per room)
Thanks again.
I have turned off rotating MAC on my phone, reconnected it and given it a static IP. I deleted the tracker in HA and reassigned it, all working again for my phone.
I will try the others as and when they visit - this should be ok and as you did, will walk them through the minor tweak needed, transparency is good here.
If that works I can leave it there, if I need more layers/stability I will look deeper into BLE - I will have some ESP32 by then, good to have in the toolbox I think.
Iāll let the dust settle and check if my phone drops out when on a non-cellular call tomorrow as I get at least one every day from my partner when on lunch If it does then that will denote another, backup layer needed I guess?
Yep. Mine is the IP address tracker covers my wifeās phone when the phone itself decides to place her GPS down the street for a few seconds randomly. I treat each as unreliable on its own and try to stack signals.
So the presence based stuff I do takes that into account.
NOTHING triggers on immediate state change. (stays x for y is yojr friend here you can debounce most noisy or flappy sensors)
Everything has a cancel or revert mechanism.
(the auto away sequence sends an actionable notification to the admin devices group)
Iāve thought about doing it dungeon crawler Ai styleā¦
New achievement! The house thinks youāre gone, or deadā¦ And is going to set away in 2 minutes unless you hit that button I sent youā¦ The one right there that says cancelā¦ Pfft. HUMANS. Reward? You donāt get one! Youāre not here to get it!)
Nice, I think the iPhone_Detect integration uses mDNS broadcast tracking/pinging or something like that, it was supposed to get round changing IPās I recall.
Anyway itās working for one phone at present and will get more on as and when, thanks for the help.
This statement is not correct. Yes it uses mDNS. However you still need to have one fixed IP per phone. See my comment above from the other day.
mDNS does not mean you can get around IP changes.
Ok thanks for the reminder, it does seem to work so thats something at least
Can an ESP32 running as a BLE proxy/hub also run a DHT22 temp/humid sensor as well??
I have some of these running on ESP8266 but could replace if it means I can build a BLE mesh type setup. Just thoughts for future use thats allā¦
In short, Yes.
As regards my ābeing at homeā, if I have tracking via iPhone_detect and on my companion app, location sensors>background location & Location Zone enabled, does HA use that information to back-up my device location or not??
TBH iām not really sure what having those sensors turned on on my phone actually do - any help here?
So far the iPhone_detect seems to be functioning well.
Yes. home/not_home is derived from is this tracked person in the home zone.
That is true if any of the device tracker entities registered to person.* is in zone.home.
So if you have three different trackers any one of them can say āDaveās here!ā
It takes all of them simultaneously not reporting in zone to get āDaveās not here, manā¦ā
(yeah couldnāt help it.)
Real effect. You leave - youāll remain āinā zone home until your device tracker with the longest release time releases. (so can be good or bad depending on what you want, more reliability in zone or faster outā¦). Come home, the first tracker to switch puts you āhomeā
Thats great, thanks.
Am i right that if i wanted to disable this location tracker, I just turn off background location and location zone in the mobile app?
Does location zone work independently of background location? I think it does but thought iād ask as i need to reduce battery consumption and i only need to track when i reach the āhomeā zone.
The Person integration docs starts with a description of how different device tracker types effect the personās state and the order of precedence they are given.
Also, see the companion app docs on iOS location tracking.
Hi again,
still messing with bolstering my tracking; today I was home alone, in the garden and after a while the house shut down and marked me as not home.
Clearly not good but if I have a zone setup, zone.location turned on in my companion app and the phone-detect integration running, is it plausible that both the GPS and the WiFi tracker flipped out for long enough to trip the person/home setting??
Not sure if i need to set a bigger zone area in zones or try something different ??Maybe something like only allowing lock-down if the front door was opened & closed within a certain period (it has a sensor already)
Apart from today, the person/home setup has been very good but this shows me I need to do some further work i think.
Any suggestions??