Hi … Here’s the scenario. My wife and I forget to lock our cars on the odd occasion. Inevitably, that night our cars are opened and someone goes through them to see if there’s anything to steal. I’d love to have something in Home Assistant that would wake me up, trigger lights, etc. if this happened. I already have cameras pointed, but I get the alerts from them too late.
I’m thinking a battery operated presence or vibration sensor would connect to my network when in the driveway … and then alert. Any thoughts on a good solution and product for this use case???
Ideally you’d want to mount a motion detector(s) that monitors the area around the auto to turn on your lights when motion is detected around your car and before your auto is entered. With the auto in your driveway, you may additionally be able to have a battery powered vibration sensor picked up by HA. What and how depends on the location specifics. (Presence detectors are more for detecting whether a person is present when not moving, like while watching TV or reading).
Once you get the motion detector to turn lights on when your auto is approached, you can make additional improvements for alerts, alarms, and such.
You could also fashion an automation to remind you between dinner and sleep that you want to insure your car is locked.
Have you checked if the cars can be locked from Home Assistant? Depending on make and model you can set up an automation which checks if the car is unlocked and then locks it.
I’ve setup a few triggers to test based on camera motion (currently using blink cams). I get a lot of false positives though. The false positives are not an issue with the camera recording video and turning on lights … but I personally don’t want to be woken up out of bed for false alerts! lol.
You’d want a dedicated motion sensor. I also tried security cam triggers, but were too problematic for me to resolve. My devices are primarily zigbee. I started with, and like, Hue outdoor sensors. They can drop off HA times, but a line or two of yaml in the configuration.yaml file cures that. I’ll let others speak of their preferred motion sensors. I’d presume you want a ZHA (zigbeee) sensor, but I don’t know if that’s the truth.
If in your shoes, I get one Hue outdoor, one outdoor Aqara motion sensor, and experiment with them. You’d likely try them in different locations before you hit on THE placement that’s best. You could even find it useful to utilize two motion sensors grouped to act as one (again, depending on the details of the location). Living in the woods, my front lights needed two sensors grouped to cover, while I have 4 motion detectors grouped as one to insure my garage doesn’t leave me in the dark (odd configuration).
I’ve not purchased a vibration sensor yet. In your shoes I would, but first I’d sort out the motion detection. You might decide that’s the first thing you’d want to accomplish.
