Does anyone have any suggestions for reliable presence detection which does not include Bluetooth?
I do not need for our phones to be tracked outside of the house (GPS etc) but I do need a reliable solution for detecting when our phones are home or not home?
I am running Hass.io in a proxmox VM and I am unable to pass through the Bluetooth so this option cannot be used. I did use Bluetooth when I was running on a Pi3 which was very reliable so I’m looking for another option that is just as reliable.
I would welcome anyone’s input on a solution whether it be single presence detection or multiple.
Thanks
But don’t phones turn off WiFi occasionally? Especially when they’re not being used? I’ve heard this option leads to false departures in the middle of the night, how do you get past that? I’ve found GPS to be pretty flaky to update for HA purposes as well…can you share exactly what you’re doing? And are you running Android or iOS phones?
I’d imagine the only reasonable option to BT to be a combination of triggers, perhaps with a Boolean sensor…
Personally I just keep a separate Pi without HA strictly for the BT stuff, running Monitor+MQTT…it’s been super-reliable for months and it can also be handy for other things, like Pi-Hole. It is “another box”, though…
I was thinking of using Wi-Fi but my router is not supported by an integration. I think using the person functionality is a good idea when I will certainly use this as part of the solution.
Maybe if I could find a MQTT client for android that might work?
I have not heard of Monitor, do you have a link? Running the Pi3 is an option to bring in the bluetooth again and MQTT to pass onto HA but like you say, it is another box and that is what I was trying to avoid using Proxmox on an Intel NUC
Thanks for this. I have tried Owntracks in the past and found it not reliable enough. I also tried GPS Logger recently and found the same with that. I also don’t like the battery drain on GPS apps.
Thanks for the comment though, if I can’t find another solution I might try owntracks again as it was some time ago that I tried it so it may be better.
If only I could get Proxmox to pass through the PCI bluetooth to the hass.io VM from the Intel NUC that would be the best solution but I just can’t get it to work
The NUC has a dual band setup on PCI, so contains both wifi and bluetooth. I can see that Bluetooth on Proxmox (which is running under Debian) has the bluetooth running but for some reason the Kernal is not loading the Intel firmware drivers which is what I think the problem is.
I also think that even if I can fix this and pass through the Bluetooth, hass.io will have problems with it as I understand that support for Intel may be lacking with HA supporting mainly Broadcom.
Monitor+MQTT seems to be the best option so far although I have not read the documentation in detail yet and I really did not want another box.
I thought about a USB BT stick but there are not many that work well with Linux so I will likely get the same problems?
Will be interested if anyone else has other suggestions?
I can highly recommend a Fingbox. Aside from the loads of cool networking tools it has, it will do excellent presence detection through IFTTT integration.
For every single person that has connected to my home WiFi I create a profile. If any user is detected at my house it will switch the heating on according to the schedule and switch it off if no one is detected.
