Ok, at the moment this is completely still in my head. Got a few ideas bouncing around in my head so thought id share them here. So is what im thinking about is presence detection in each room. Not only that but it would be cool to know who was in that room. not just that there was a presence. I heave read about the possibility of tracking a Bluetooth LE beacon arround a building. However not sure on the precision of this yet. Yes i have thought of PIR however. Pets set that off and yes you can filter but if you have 2 or 3 pets, filtering them all out but still be set off by humans is impossible. So lets say that my bluetooth idea or similar works. Whats the best way to tell Home assistant who is exactly where. I know i can tell it im home or at work or just away, but can i tell it im in the living room and have it run specific tasks based on who is in the room and the room im in.
i guess it is only possible if all persons in the house are somehow tagged.
if everyone Always carries their cellphone it is possible.
i dont think there is any other way to detect which persons are in a room.
with PIR you could detect if someone is going trough a gateway, but not who.
so if more persons enter the same room you are in the dark.
if you all carry a cellphone you could make a bluetooth or wifi point in each room, stark enough to override the other points in your house.
i dont think it would be easy and certainly not cheap though.
edit:
you could also make tagpoints in each room. but then everyone will have to tag every time they enter or leave a room.
Here is where I got some inspiration from: https://ideas.redpepper.land/has-anyone-seen-my-dog-c7da3e0e47b9#.3zkgnrr49
If everyone carried a Bluetooth beacon and every room had a raspberry pi in it maybe a couple extra for perfect coverage. I don’t see why they can’t be tracked pretty well. Only issue could be precision. If your in adjoining rooms. Estimote have created a beacon that can be placed on walls and used to map rooms apparently which is cool but very expensive for whole house mapping. Not much point doing it for one room.
thats what i meant with everyone carrying theire cellphone.
we are here with 3 persons, and i’m pretty sure that if i asked to carry anything at all every minute, at least 1 would say …
and when not then it would probably forgotten all the time.
if is not the same with youre home, i guess it could work with bluetooth or wifi.
Brainstorming. You could figure out who is who by having a pressure sensitive mat that acts as a scale, but you’d need to put it in places where everyone walks, and it wouldn’t work if more than one entity is the same weight.
that way of brainstorming i like 
you could also make a distance sensor at the top from every gateway(door) from every room.
if a person goes trough the door it measures the height off the person.
2 PIR sensors sence the direction
and a pressure sensor detects the weight at that same time.
i guess there is not a chance that there are 2 persons with the same height AND weight.
that way you Always know which person goes from 1 room to another, so you Always know who is where.
you only need 4 sensors and an arduino for every door.
there is this: https://www.density.io Its a relatively expensive service but basically works by counting the number of people entering and leaving a room. So I guess its probably PIR based…
You could have multiple BLE waypoints with overlapping areas that can “see” the same devices.
By assessing the relative signal strengths of the waypoints you can determine the location of the BLE device.
Would require tuning the system (and keeping the waypoints in constant known locations).
Ninjasphere was promising to deliver this (but did not) - they called it trilateration
article here: http://mashable.com/2013/12/08/ninja-sphere-kickstarter/#BdoA6jC1imq9
This is a quite active method as all the waypoints need to be communicating what signals they are receiving and strengths so that a “brain” somewhere can determine the location of the tracked device(s) based on the calibration.
This is exactly what the article I posted above implemented. It’s certainly doable. The trouble I have with the above pressure mat, pir, distance sensor thing, is that that is alot of wires and sensors to out arround a door and look nice or not be seen at all. I understand the thing about everyone not allways carrying there phone or whatever on them, but I think if they did it would add ease of use to the system. No reason why they can’t leave phone upstairs whilst they run downstairs to get a drink and just use the lights normally. I don’t think it’s essential but does add a useful and interesting dynamic to play with.
it also depends on the house.
if you have a house with old wooden doorframes, it wood be difficult to get rid of the wires.
in a modern house with hollow doorframes it should be easy to get rid of the wires.
i guess that if the profit (te amount off efford saved) for carrying the Phone around is high enough, it would motivate people to do so.
There’s FIND too.
The technology isn’t the real barrier here; there are a number of ways you could do this.
The real question is if the human beings will submit to being tracked this closely. I guess that will depend on the benefits of doing so outweighing the privacy concerns.
Sure, it’s your own family, but I can’t imagine any teenager (or some adults) wanting anyone to know where they are at all times.
Just a thought, not a criticism.
I saw something earlier this year, perhaps on Kickstarter, that consisted of 7 transmitter/receivers modules. Those modules would be placed around the home and the interaction of the radio waves would create for want of a better term, a radar map. A person moving through the home would disturb the radio waves in a unique way, identifying the person and perhaps even the activity. That would make it possible to turn lights on before someone reached the room.
BLE would be indeed an option. You could use ibeacons in the rooms that you want to track. Have a look at Estimote: http://estimote.com. The catch is that any person/pet needs to have a BLE transceiver (i.e. Phone or other device).
Not sure of this will help you any but I made a tutorial/review of the happy bubbles beacons if you’re interested in presence detection its probably about the best option I’ve found so far and the owner is working on a home assistant component for it now.
I saw happy bubbles beacons on hackadaycom and thought they looked like a great idea, and i think they will work well. Little pricey if you want to do every room though. However being open source im sure you could put together the exact same thing cheaper yourself, perhaps just not quite as pretty. As for people wanting to be tracked, i think its an optional thing that could be done for some people for some rooms to make it a bit easier. The goal in my opinion is to make your house as easy to use as possible adding useful features but ultimately having it do as much for you without any thought on your part as possible and i think tracking people could aid in that goal.
Anyone research this yet? Seem interesting but a little pricey.
http://www.xandem.com/xandem-home
I would like to have some form of consistent presence detection but it is really just a mild desire, not a necessity by any means so I would be hard pressed to spend $400+ for it.