Room presence identification

Hardware
1

In my ongoing attempts to make my instance of home assistant smarter, or at least appear that way, I’m wondering if anyone has any solutions on how to identify when a specific individual is in a specific room.

My thought is to use a ble beacon, but I’m not sure if that’s actually possible.

Example use case.

Person A hasn’t left the house in over 24 hours.
System knows that Person A is in the kitchen.
System sends announcement that perhaps a walk might be in order to smart speaker in the kitchen.

I see it as a way to better tailor the System to the individuals in the house.

Any suggestions on how I might go about this?

2

There’s a whole thread going on about it here:

3

Sadly the above project does not meet this criteria. Something like https://espresense.com/ is needed.

4

I use mqtt_room, esphome & the companion app to accomplish this. Technically it knows what room my cell phone is in but since I always carry it, by default it knows what room I’m in.

5

Could you go into how you do that a little more? I don’t use mqtt or esphome, so I need to do a little reading up on those I think.

6

You really should read about mqtt, this is in my opinion very essential in the home assistant world (and it’s not very difficult).
Then you need at least one esp32 for every room and flash them with espresence as crlogic suggested. This is very easy too as you can flash them direct from the browser with a few clicks.
When all are ready use the mqtt-room component from home assistant, this tells you in which room the bluetooth beacon (eg. your smartphone) is.

7

Here’s the steps I remember:

  1. on the companion app go to manage sensors, bt sensors, enable BLE Transmitter (this makes your phone a beacon)

  2. you need an esp32 for multiple rooms, I loaded the software to each esp devices using this thread as my guide. One per room, this picks up the beacon and publishes as an mqtt transaction.
    ESPHome and Android Beacon Simulator - the perfect presence detection (almost there!)

  3. configure mqtt_room in HA. This subscribes to the mqtt transactions published in step 2.

After you do the above, you will end up with a sensor in HA called room_presence that you can use in automations to tell you to go for a walk. Hope that helps

8

Instead of phone you can use a smart watch as the beacon. I use ones from Xiaomi(Band 5 or Band 6).
An apple watch will do nicely if you are in to Apple universe.
I use the Band 6 to detect if my kids are back home from school.