Suggestions on keeping track of keys with roomassistant

A few weeks ago my partner left the keys in the door and as we have a thumb lock on the inside she didn’t realise they had been left out there for a short while. I obviously don’t want this to happen again so I’m looking for a solution in HA to alert me if the keys are in the door for longer than X seconds. No need to rely on muscle memory when we have HA to help!

As far as I can tell there’s only a handful of ways to do this… A camera with object recognition pointed at the door, something to sense that the key has been placed in an exact area indoors or a bluetooth tracker with roomassistant to determine if the keys are indoors.

The first two options are either too much effort or are too unreliable I think so I’m leaning towards the second which should be fine as we generally place the keys in a spot away from the door anyway so roomassistant should be able to tell quite easily that they’re indoors.

I just want to see if anyone else has tackled this “problem” before and to hear your suggestions. I’d also be interested in hearing about the smallest BLE tracker that works with roomassistant to use on the keyring. I know not all work and the cheapest ones are quite large e.g. my Samsung smart tag just isn’t supported due to how it handles id’s.

Thanks!

You could try a small bowl with a cheap door sensor glued underneath, and put a magnet on the key ring. Then when they drop the keys in, the magnet would trigger the reed switch in the door sensor.

Ideally I’d find a solution and apply it to the other door keys (we don’t always take the car key) which wouldn’t work with that solution sadly.

One bowl per key, then have a template sensor that triggers only when all the keys are in bowls. You won’t be able to tell which key is missing that way, but you would be able to see that 2 out of 3 keys are where they belong.

You also might be able to do something with a NFC sensor and tags on each keyring, but I don’t know how close the tag has to be to trigger the sensor.

There’s sadly a next to 0% chance my partner would allow a selection of key bowls on the side! It’s probably not the most practical solution. I do think the bluetooth is the only reasonable solution in terms of being unobtrusive and a single solution across multiple keys.

When you find a BT tracker that fits on the keychain, please post, I’m interested.

It would sure be nice to know exactly which room my keys are in the next time I misplace them.

I have a Tile tag on my keyring. (It’s the “Mate” version - 37mm square and 7mm thick - not tiny but no bigger than many keyfobs.)

I have the roomassistant add-on in HA and it works very well, using BLE to detect the presence of the keys - very easy to set up, particularly if you already have the MQTT integration and Mosquitto broker add-on.

I did try to set up a roomassistant cluster, with a RPi in each room, but that was a disaster - roomassistant hasn’t had any attention for at least a year and some of the Raspberry Pi Bluetooth components seem to be depreciated. The upshot is that I have BLE detection, but only within range of the machine running my HA instance. As it happens this is enough for my purposes - whether it works for you depends on your house - if your HA is reasonably close to the front door, roomassistant should easily be able to detect that the keys are still in the lock.

Thanks! To be honest, as much as I’d prefer a smaller one I can’t find a single one that’s noticeably smaller (if at all) than the tile mate ones. Even the ones advertised as being “smaller” are just about the same size so I think that might be a winner. I’d prefer a slightly different shape to match the car key and house key profile but that also doesn’t seem to exist sadly.

I actually leave the keys on the cabinet that contains the server (and bluetooth stick), which is quite far from the door so that should be no problem.

I’ll keep an eye for when they go on sale, just good to know the tile ones don’t change their addresses like the Samsung tags which render roomassistant useless.