What about WiFi connection to your access point/router?
I do use the person functionality and have WiFi and GPS sensors for each person enabled.
Works great.
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?
Why not continue to use bluetooth via the pi? Monitor connects to HA via MQTT so it does not need to be on the same machine.
2 Likes
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
Long thread sorry! [monitor] Reliable, Multi-User, Distributed Bluetooth Occupancy/Presence Detection
Thanks, I’ll take a look
When you are willing to install an app on your phone you can easily set up owntracks http with home assistant.
For me it is working really good the last 1.5 years.
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.
I’ve heard that Owntracks is less reliable on Android than on iOS, maybe that’s why there’s this different experience?
You may be right and I only use Android
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
VirtualBox passes stuff thru just fine 
edit: wait, you said PCI, I only tried USB…USB BT stick?
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?
If you are on iOS then maybe this can help
iOS users --
Unfortunately I am not a iOS user. Android only in the house.
I have trieda bunch, owntracks, using the router, ping and life360. Life360 is the most releibale
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.
Seriously good piece of kit. Check it out.
I use ping, it works great as everyday the roomba starts cleaning after we left the house
I use the router and Google maps for presence detections but I’m not 100% happy with it and looking into Bluetooth also.
The router takes to long to detect that I’m home and way to long to detect that I’m no longer home. I’m assume it holds on to my phone details for a while just incase for quicker reconnections.
Google maps is good but still takes about a minute to change my details to home. Looking for something more instant or 10 seconds in time to detect.