My wife’s parents pick up our little girl from day care two days per week. They are nice enough to drop her off within about 15 minutes of the time that I finish my work from home job. I would like to set up some presence detection that can alert me ASAP when they arrive and also turn on the porch lights now that it gets dark so early.
I don’t want to install anything on their phones. They both use iPhones so I don’t think any kind of wifi hardware ID-based solution would work. Perhaps some kind of Bluetooth presence detection? They both drive fairly new vehicles with Bluetooth-enabled radios, but I think they listen to terrestrial radio all the time.
You only have the option to set up some detection in your front yard, like a camera or motion sensor, but it would not be limited to the in-laws.
Bluetooth are usually only 10m in range and at max 100m if no obstacles is in the way, but that is only if visibility is turned on, like when it is in pairing mode.
Most on-person electronics today are secured, so no way to track that way.
If they connect to the WIFI, then a ARP lookup would be a possibility, but there might be some issues,
An AP does not broadcast its SSID all the time. Usually its on a 30 or so seconds interval, so you might have to wait 29 seconds before the phone realize that the WIFI is available and tries to connect.
Then the connection have to be made which can take a few seconds too and HA have to register it which again can take a few seconds depending on how the value is pulled,
All of this might run up in a less than a minute and that should be fine if they have to fiddle a bit by the car and the WIFI can be reached there and their phones are powerful enough to actually reach the AP too, which means the location of the AP in relation to the parking spot is really important for this to work well.
I use monitor for access control. There are several people that can enter my house with their phone. No apps, no beacon’s, just their blue tooth mac and monitor will resolve randomized macs.
Front camera motion triggers the scan and executes in 2-3 seconds, it’s fast. You can use it as a trigger to turn on/open locks. I’ve been using it for more than 6 months and never had a false trigger.
E. For further security the phones can be paired to the nodes and use it’s rssi signal as an additional qualifier. Rssi is only available when the phone has been paired.
E. 2 It seems the newest version of mqtt does not work, it’s being worked on. You’ll need to use an older client v 1.5.7 on the monitor node.
Why not just use the iPhone presence detection to toggle switches in HA? You could easily connect them to a special instance of an isolated HomeKit setup so that as they enter a zone it would trigger the switches that then control automation? I do that with a few folks and it works great.
Instead of trying to monitor the in-laws, have you considered trying to track your child? If she always carries the same jacket, keys or backpack you could attach some kind of tracker to that object, and keep track of the tracker instead of the adults.
I just want to take a second to mention mac randomization wasn’t implemented for fun. It was a serious privacy concern. Using a fixed mac allows the phone to be easily tracked. This is why I prefer using monitor, keeping my phones advertisements random.
I just want to take a second to mention mac randomization wasn’t implemented for fun. It was a serious privacy concern. Using a fixed mac allows the phone to be easily tracked. This is why I prefer using monitor, keeping my phones advertisements random.
You can disable the MAC address randomization on a per-SSID basis. I only do it for the wireless networks at home.
That is only with wifi. Bluetooth, specifically beacons, advertises an id address that can be picked up by any bluetooth scanner. That address could then be spoofed and used to access your property.
The only thing I used to enable access to my property is scanning an NFC tag with the Home Assistant application which fires an event. The application is authenticated so it’s equivalent to pushing a button on the Home Assistant dashboard on your phone.
That said, device_trackers are still very useful, you just have to ascribe the right level of trust to them. I use Wi-FI based device trackers to great effect… to turn on the porch light when I get, not unlock the door.
One technique that I use with the in-laws is that I’ve given them their own set of access codes for the Z-Wave capable lock on the front door. So whenever the door is unlocked from the keypad, various things happen that differ first based on if it’s “us” that live in the house, or some visitor with their code. When a “visitor” unlocks the door, we get sent a push notification, they get an extra friendly greeting from the Amazon Echo devices after the enter the house and additional lighting gets turned on.
This worked great for the pet sitter we hired. Once. Because they didn’t quite show up as often as they should had. Thanks Home Assistant!