What are the methods I can use to detect me being at home besides WLAN?
I have several automations that depend on being home, coming home or leaving. They have run fine for a long time. My new phone logs off WLAN irregularly. It seems to be a known bug. I’m working on it, but there seems little I can do.
I’ve tried searching the documentation without success. What other methods can I use to detect, whether I am at home? I am not using the cloud and not using location services. My HA is strictly local.
One example: When my phone logged out before six this morning, HA saw me as not at home and did not start the coffee machine. In winter heating will be affected.
I know the cause is the buggy phone, but am looking for a workaround.
BLE tracking, plus this:
Thank you. How do I enable HA to see bluetooth devices? Bluetooth as such is enabled on the Raspberry.
There are many ways, with different levels of accuracy. There are so many ble devices around that they are not autodetected by Home Assistant default, it would end up creating hundreds of useless trackers. Depending on what ble device you want to track there are different approaches. The HA app can emulate a beacon and you also have dedicated trackers. Complexity is higher for devices that change their mac address to avoid this, but there are ways around that. Pick your poison:
You can even go as far as to track room presence:
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Thank you. Bluetooth is shown under integrations. I made the change to configuration.yaml but Bluetooth LE Tracker does not show up. I did restart (twice).
# Loads default set of integrations. Do not remove.
default_config:
# Load frontend themes from the themes folder
frontend:
themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes
# Enable bluetooth
bluetooth:
device_tracker:
- platform: bluetooth_le_tracker
# Text to speech
# tts:
# - platform: google_translate
automation: !include automations.yaml
script: !include scripts.yaml
scene: !include scenes.yaml
template: !include templates.yaml
modbus: !include modbus.yaml
As said, the devices are not autodetected. For devices with a fixed ble mac, you can add it to known_devices.yaml (though deprecated, there is no other way I know of to start tracking). But what is it you intend to track? many devices change mac nowadays.
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Some times the reason the wifi disconnects is because of battery saving programs on the phone. Aside from what is noted in the docs, some manufactures have additional battery savers. Look for your manufacturer on the following page to see if there are any additional power savers.
What do you hope zones would contribute? The problem is how to detect home or not home for an instance of HA that is purely local, and unreliable wifi. Besides solving the latter, there are very few options.
I’m not using zones, nor remote access with mobile, but it’s just curiosity if this could be a solution.
Of course, you need remote access with a mobile device.
If that’s the case, is it not possible to use leaving/entering the home zone as a way to determine more reliable being home or not instead of what they are using now?
If the phone drops off wifi, as is the case, and has no remote access though cellular, then all device trackers will report not_home, and the nome zone will also not see any device tracker. Also router or ping device trackers will not work.
So the only way I see is a non-network based tracker. So that is why I suggested bluetooth. I use tiles for my bikes and my car.
Thanks for explaining! 
I just wanted to know whether, IF having mobile access through cellular would be a working solution and if so, make it clear in this thread so it’s an option as well.
That’s what I feared. I’m working on it, but if it’s a hardware bug, I may be stuck.