Room occupancy for a homeseer convert

Hi all

I am another refugee coming from the increasingly frustrating world of homeseer. I’ve been with it for 5yrs or more but the lack of a decent UI and poor support for my devices (2yrs now since Nest was broken!) is attracting me here. At the core of my homeseer automation was a plugin called blradar. This allowed me to group multiple sensors and use them to trigger room occupancy. I would then use the room occupancy state combined with other virtual devices such as one indicating sunrise and sunset, to automate lights. The first issue I am having is there seems to be a lot more ways of doing things with home assistant and I’m trying to make sure I start with a solid approach. Can anyone recommend a blueprint or automation examples that might replicate the occupancy part? I think what I need is an input_boolean entity that gets turned on and off based on these different things, but I created one and was not able to work out how to turn it on and off (I tried using the service to turn on but booleans don’t seem to be a viable option). I’m sure this is just me not quite understanding the concepts yet so if there are any homeseer converts who might be able to help me draw some parallels with it, or examples I can look at to learn from that would be helpful.
I can already see that this is going to be a good move once I work out the differences. I’d be interested in experiences of other migrants in case I can learn from your successes / mistakes! I have a lot of zwave stuff to migrate but have already successfully got my DSC and Yale alarms, Nest and Adax heating and other plugin equivalents working and some of those were not even supported on homeseer, so I am feeling good about it!

Welcome!

I’ve also moved from HS, completed my switch around April this year. I don’t have any direct help on your occupancy setup as I don’t have such systems setup (yet).

I suspect others will need more information. Such as what kind and how many sensors are you using to detect occupancy in each room?

Hi and thanks for the reply. I’m trying to use my DSC alarm motion sensors initially (via envisalink integration). They all show up as binary sensors. In some areas (eg hallway) this is enough and I have a short timeout. In other areas (eg bathroom) I combine motion with door sensor. In living areas I combine motion with other things like harmony hub status to determine if tv is on. I’m guessing I will probably need to create an automation per room and combine with timers?

I would definitely break it down into zones. (Room, areas, etc). Have you seen this blueprint?

Yes I discovered that earlier today. I’ve been able to combine this with another light blueprint to replicate most of what I had with homeseer. The one challenge is that blueprint has a single timeout and actually I need different ones for each room. I’ll have to dig in and see if I can work out how to make that more flexible.

Thanks