I want to put some sort of simple wireless tag in my son’s diaper bag to act as a device tracker for my son. It just needs to provide home/not_home. This will help with occupancy automations when someone else is watching him. Unfortunately I can’t use something that requires the bag to be placed in the same spot every time, and I’d like to avoid frequent battery changes.
My home assistant server is a raspberrypi 3b.
It looks like there are some good BTLE tag options, but it also looks like all of those actually use your phone app to talk to home assistant?
Does anyone have any hardware recommendations for this? I’m a bit of a cheapskate but price isn’t too much of an issue because I only need one.
BLE seemingly isnt as easy as it should be (resource intensive it seems). There are a few options but mostly are using a secondary device (like a pi zero) to purely detect a BLE tag and then using MQTT turns on a switch in HA. Some folks have used multiple pi zeros creating a mesh and then use presence detection based on a rule if 1 or more of the MQTT switches are on.