[monitor] Reliable, Multi-User, Distributed Bluetooth Occupancy/Presence Detection

RevelRob · February 22, 2019, 8:54am

I’m having a similar situation to something I experienced in a past beta.
My iBeacon tag is found by both MAC and UUID addresses; however, it only publishes UUID when confidence goes down.

teachingbirds · February 22, 2019, 8:57am

Make sure to set source type to bluetooth

Klagio · February 22, 2019, 11:25am

That’s nice, but what about when you have multiple monitor? If the room are near it will say home to all of them

I also hope someone makes it easy to have room detection, since having different rssi values the component could say in which room the phone/beacon is based on the highest rssi value (I am trying to do it myself, but so far its a mess, I am not good enough in templating/programming)

Klagio · February 22, 2019, 11:26am

In my (standard) settings I receive either 0 or 100 in the confidence value, the only variable level is rssi. Do I have to set some settings to have a variable confidence level?

Klagio · February 22, 2019, 3:10pm

I will try to use these, to avoid having Unknown state after restart. Still trying to figure out all the implication of such command, I have more simple/newb linux question, how do I run automatically the above command, so that is performed after each restart/reboot of the pi ?

jcastro · February 22, 2019, 9:44pm

@andrewjfreyer I setup the new variable PREF_DEVICE_TRACKER_REPORT but I’m finding that the individual sensors are reporting correctly Home or Away while the person: (2 device_tracks per each person) is actually reporting home and not_home. Not sure if this is something wrong with the new person feature or monitor?

andrewjfreyer · February 22, 2019, 10:09pm

Make sure all your sensors are on the latest version, do a git pull to be sure. Else, I’m guessing this is a display issue since monitor does not capitalize “Home” and does not send a status of “Away” as of the most recent version.

jcastro · February 22, 2019, 10:20pm

Yes, I only have 1 monitor running and it’s on version 0.2.022

Top 4 sensors are the MQTT ones from monitor and they look fine (Home and Away), it’s when I create the person that it looks incorrectly

jcastro · February 22, 2019, 10:42pm

Seems like the Confidence idea is better. Using device_tracker and person as soon as one of those devices doesn’t respond will turn your person to away. Rolling back to Confidence for now

benjimatt · February 23, 2019, 1:53am

well technically you just need to run it once. I do -d to go to the default configs when I update and -u will update the service file. So technically I only need -x and -tdr. But when I call a restart it automatically uses -x and -tdr as that is what -u writes to the systemctl file.

type this in the terminal

cd ~
cd monitor

you should now be in the monitor directory

run this once (type in terminal)

sudo bash monitor.sh -u -d -tdr -x

This should write to the service file. to confirm this. go back to the terminal and type this

nano /etc/systemd/system/monitor.service

you should see something like this

[Unit]
Description=Monitor Service
After=network.target

[Service]
User=root
ExecStart=/bin/bash /home/pi/monitor/monitor.sh -tdr -x &amp;
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/monitor
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target network.target

once you restart the settings should stay the same. if they DONT than type this.

sudo systemctl enable monitor.service

Klagio · February 23, 2019, 7:01am

Great thanks a lot. Updated all my 4 pi!!
Now I should never get confidence “Unknown” value i suppose.
Now need to understand why the value is only 0% or 100% (never in between) , or is this how it should be?

Klagio · February 23, 2019, 9:03am

@andrewjfreyer great component!

Have you thought of doing a monitor server? Now I have 4 monitor instance, probably planning to put more (like 6-7 in total) will start to be tough to keep everything updated, and adding known devices is time consuming and easy to make errors. Would be cool to have a monitor server on a host and then monitor client on each listening device

legit · February 23, 2019, 3:22pm

@andrewjfreyer great work!

Was wondering how to delete a pairing between iPhone and a raspberry pi.

monitor.sh -c

I realize right now I don’t need RSSI (or want to deal with RSSI threshold tuning in behavior_preferences just yet) over just confidence values. Is it as simple as going into iPhone / Bluetooth and choosing “Forget this device”? Or is there anything else I need to do on the pi-zero-w side?

Thanks!

andrewjfreyer · February 23, 2019, 4:46pm

Confidence will fall very fast, and won’t be visible in this time scale. You can see the fall in confidence in the monitor log.

andrewjfreyer · February 23, 2019, 4:47pm

Yes, I’ve considered this. Have to be careful not to add to installation complexity, but I have a few ideas.

andrewjfreyer · February 23, 2019, 4:51pm

I’ll write instructions for forgetting a device into the Readme this weekend. Thanks for pointing out that this isn’t clear!

Here’s one method. Open an ssh session and type:

bluetoothctl

To remove a device, type:

remove aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

sidhuneilkamal · February 23, 2019, 10:48pm

I am noticing when there are scans that my WiFi smart light switches drop their WiFi for a second and reconnect. Has anyone else seen this?

andrewjfreyer · February 24, 2019, 2:04am

Known issue with interference caused by the bt/wifi radios on the raspberry pi zero. If the interference is intolerable, a bluetooth dongle or wifi dongle can help.

sidhuneilkamal · February 24, 2019, 2:17am

Thanks… So a WiFi donggle will work as well? How will that work with monitor as it won’t see BT macs? Would it instead see WiFi macs?

andrewjfreyer · February 24, 2019, 2:23am

The issue appears to be mostly when WIFI and bluetooth are operated together, so a wifi dongle or a bluetooth dongle has been helpful to other users.