Presence detection with bluetooth and simple key finder

Configuration
1

I finally have working presence detection with Bluetooth. My idea is to buy simple bluetooth key finders for each key set and use those instead of mobile phones.

Something like those:
https://www.gearbest.com/other-consumer-electronics/pp_1666244.html
https://www.gearbest.com/other-consumer-electronics/pp_1233024.html

Did anyone already try something like this? Will this work?

1 Like
2

What Bluetooth presence are you using?

In order to get these to work you need to look at using either
Room Assistant
or
This

I use Room assistant with Nut3 ibeacons the built in LE BLE Tracker doesn’t work to well and I have fought this very battle for weeks now and have found room assistant installed on separate Pi Zeros has been faultless.

3

I am using built in bluetooth tracker on RP3B+ and Hass.io. For mobile phone is working but I don’t have bluetooth always on (neither wifi).

I have keys almost next to the RPi and when I take them with me I want to be marked as Away. I don’t need room presence. I just have to know if anyone is home or not.

4

This is all I use this for also. I use the built in Bluetooth tracker for phone tracking I also use the nut tracker on my keys to keep me in the “home” “not home” state. This isn’t done via the built in Bluetooth you need something else to do it so either remove your Bluetooth tracking and add the room assistant addon for hassio. Or you can do what I did and have a second pi in my case a raspberry pi zero with room assistant and feed that into your main pi. You can find my configuration in my repo here look for my package called presence all config relating to it is in there.

5

Thank you for all the info. I will look at your configs.

I will also order one or two those and try them. I will took them to arrive but I will post my findings here.

Additional offtopic question if you maybe have the answer?

In History it doesn’t show device name:

history
history1151×69 4.82 KB

known_devices.yaml:
my_device:
hide_if_away: false
icon: mdi:human-male
mac: BT_78:62:56:4D:77:44
name: ‘My name’
picture:
track: true

I also try with customize.yaml but it didn’t help:
device_tracker.my_device:
friendly_name: ‘My name’

6

I’m not sure as I have my presence sensors feed into a template sensor but my known_device looks like this

james_phone:
  hide_if_away: false
  icon:
  mac:
  name: james phone
  picture:
  track: true

My state history like this

image

7

Does Nuki Fob could be used as Presence Detector as well?

8

I find HASS is ok with sniffing and detecting the presence of Bluetooth devices and the IDs. Does anyone have a solution that will allow HASS to make the trackers ring/beep?

I hoping to find a cheap solution to finding misplaced remote controls around the house. Like “ok google, find the TV remote”

9

Hi!!
Did u make it work?

10

I did but with RF key finders bought off Amazon. I use a Broadlink RM pro to emulate the RF signal for each tracker.

11

I’m interested to hear how you done this. Do you need to ping the keyrings every few seconds to check that they’re still home?

Edit: apologies have just seen that your requirements were to be able to have them emit a noise to find them, and not to track presence. Never mind me