Room Presence tools & options

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Hi All,

Moved over from SmartThings to HomeAssistant this week and really enjoying it.

I’m interested in room presence leveraging something other than motion detectors. I’m not looking for every room in the house so will start small; office, bedroom, etc. Been playing around with Find3’s active scanning but it seems to introduce too many false positives and is dependent on an app running on each user’s device.

So I’m exploring other options… I’ve purchased three Raspberry PI Zeros and will put them (and probably more) around the house. Is it worth investing the time building these out as passive Find3 scanners (https://www.internalpositioning.com/doc/passive_tracking.md)? Anyone have any success tuning it such that it’s consistently reliable? Would it make more sense to look at the room-assistant project and use the ble per room (https://www.home-assistant.io/components/sensor.mqtt_room/)? Xandem looks to be pretty expensive.for my use case.

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Have you looked at some esp8266’s with PIR sensors attached?

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I have not yet – I saw some stuff on using the esp8266 + Bluetooth/WiFi in lieu of the raspberry PIs.

Something like this? How to add ESP8266 with PIR motion sensor

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Or something a little easier… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpjfVc-9IrQ

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That looks like a lot of fun… I’m going to try it out. Thanks for sharing!

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Putting this together. Any suggestions on how to power it other than a wall wart and long cable running up the wall?

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Not really a battery option with the motion thing you can mount the motion by itself somewhere away with a longer wire.

I have mounted one in a case with 2 motion sensors for each direction on the wall and wall fished a 5 volt power wire down from the attic.