I got this working! yes!
Only setbacks I have this time:
Inconsistant time delays (sometimes it changes room quite fast other times it takes very long)
Occasionally set the state to “not_home” when it does not see any movement of the tag (e.g. when I am sleeping)
Somebody any tips or hits?
Note that my tag is a RadBeacon Dot tag.
I’ve left the default settings of 3 advertisements per second
I’ve set up room assistant MQTT to an update rate of 5seconds, to not overstack the MQTT server with messages.
Thus I was kinda expecting to have my updates within 5 to 10 seconds, yet it takes longer and sometimes even 40 to 60sec.
The timeout that returns ‘not_home’ and also an aspec of the update speed is in the mqtt_room settings and is quite low. I would be inclined to experiment with long timeouts or mqtt_room might need to be forked to deal with presence properly. The common thread I find with tracking and presence is that state is recorded on significant change and in this case it’s not handling a lack of significant change.
My settings are in my first post at the top of this topic
As I say I think the issue would be with the away timeout, and my guess would be you could set it to a long period - say 8 -10 hours, as there should always be a change in that period, but you would have the last known location before you went to bed. The alternative would be to make the mqtt_room component not change to away when it no longer detects a beacon. I actually only noticed this when I was testing another presence system.
ah, correct
I have the same settings of MQTT_Room in Home Assistance.
The Room Assistance however, I have set the “update_frequency” to 5000, as I understood from the documentation that this value is in milliseconds and I also read in above posts that some users had issues with overstacking the MQTT server with messages resulting in the server to crash.
I think it must be five seconds, which probably isn’t necessary so I may increase it. Your use case may vary of course.
As for MQTT it may depend on how many things are accessing it and indeed whether you are using mosquitto or the native server in HA but I would rather suspect the buffer response may actually be the issue there, especially if it’s on a slowish SD card.
Interesting topic, I’ve also been looking at this recently and I think I’ll use some ESP32 as “sensor”.
They already include bluetooth and wifi, so with the right piece of code, they should be good to go without any soldering or other module.
And they cost only 6$ with no need for SD card, more availability than pi zero w, no sd corruption and lower power consumption.
I’ve order some ESP32 and can share my result once I got them if there is some interest (I plan to make them publish mqtt message for happy-bubbles).
Interesting, keep us posted by all means. I was thinking about devices like this and I think Happy Bubbles are based on the ESP32. I may have a look myself.
I got this working with an external mqtt, very strange when creating the user “roomassistant” and sharing the topic “#” and using the credentials for the created user i could not connect.
I could connect from room-assistant using the default username / password but no topics was pushed from “room-assistant” to my mqtt instance.
I then created a user with the same username / password as the default user and saw the messages populate into the console.
No, they are based on an ESP8266, a custom PCB and a Bluetooth module, thus making them more expensive to produce.
It’s a pity for the guy who created them, it was a beautiful product for small series.
But, it could now be replaced by of the shelf component (I say that but the bluetooth module is maybe not the same/not as good on the ESP32, we’ll see )
Just a thought, mine started crashing after a day. Went back through the docs and realised I’ve got each room assistant client using the same MQTT login. Changed these so they now have an individual one each and its been working like a dream since.
I don’t have a whole lot of time this weekend to explain and post the code, but I already got it working (but not finalize).
You can see here some example of BLE usage in Arduino sketch for the ESP32:
And this library is already in the espressif official Arduino ESP32 repo:
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