The most accurate room presence Home Assistant

Hardware
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1

Hi, everyone!

I am thinking to build the most accurate room presence system and I need some ideas. First of all, I started thinking about motion sensors and many many rules in home assistant, by mounting one motion sensor in every room, then some rules similar like: If sensor from the lobby has been detected a movement then in maximum 5 seconds, the sensor from room 1 senses movement = I’m in that room, and so on, many rules to know where you are in the last moment, but if there are many people in the house, the rules will do wrong with everything and you will not know where is exactly in the room, because the sensor are detecting something everytime, mostly because there will be movement…

For the most accurate room presence, I think I will need two IR Beam Sensors with 433hz or zigbee transmitter, to every door. There should be a distance at least 3-5 cm between the pair of IR Beam Sensors… and with this system and some rules, you can detect if someone is inside of a room or he/she gone outside of that room… The rules for a door should be something like: If sensor one is triggered, then sensor two, you got in the room… If sensor two is triggered first then sensor one, you went outside the room…

Now, the ideal hardware IR or Laser Beam sensor, from my opinion, should be something which have already a 433 or zigbee transmitter which sends datas everytime when it is triggered, and of course, working with batteries…

Till now, I only found the IR/Laser beam sensor separately, then the 433mhz transmitter, and all are working with a power adapter of 3-5-6-9-12V, not with batteries…

Any ideas? Please avoid to tell me anything about bluetooth presence, door sensor, wireless presence, tags, low gps or something which is not too accurate…

2

I remember someone posted how they used a heat sensor camera.
It gave good results if I remember correctly.
They are rather expensive but at least you will have easier rules/automations.

3

Try the Bayesian sensor. It will combine inputs from multiple sources and distill it down to a single “on/off” sensor that you can use for automation.

Use it to combine everything you can to make a good determination as to whether someone is in the room.

I combine my ecobee sensors, motions sensors, tv status, Sonos status, and time of day to help the Bayesian sensor make an educated guess as to the status of the room.

4

I think that the Bayesian sensor it is doing exactly what I have achieved with the rules, but automatically, more or less accurate.

5

Heat sensor cameras, yes, could be something ok, but not perfect… If I have a heating source in the room, it can confuse the camera a little :slight_smile:

6

As I said in the post, with a pair of laser/ir beams, I could make the most accurate… this is the product with beam

This IR object detector sensor, can be mounted as a pair on every door, the response time is <2 ms, the range is around 90cm and the good part is that you can know which one was triggered first, from that pair of two. Which makes you aware if somebody went out or in. It’s an open circuit, which means that if you pair with a relay, every time when the sensor is triggered, sends data to the relay and close it. All I need is a device to “pair” with this IR sensor, to send data through 433 or zigbee/mqtt to Home Assistant, but I did not find anything ok

7

Perhaps ESPHome is the way to go? Maybe get an esp8266 and program it to read the result and update Home Assistant. Have you looked at ESPHome?

8

Take a look at: Slamtec RPLIDAR A1 - 360 Laser Range Scanner : ID 4010 : $99.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits perhaps controlled with ESP8266 SMT Module [ESP-12F] : ID 2491 : $6.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits - I’m looking at this, I have an open shot gun type house and 2 of these will cover most of my home, much programming/logic needed tho but would allow you to track people down to the cm anywhere.