These guys were going to bring this to market, but seems theyve changed direction.
I saw it in BRuh a while back
https://www.xandem.com/
At the moment the only reliable solution for exact room presence detection is using a thermopile grid sensor such as Panasonic Grid-EYE
Altough not cheap (about $30 per sensor), it’s still pretty affordable but requires some pretty simple build on Arduino, RPI or other DIY.
There are modules available on Aliexpress
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Ooh nice; this could be super useful for an upcoming project. Thanks!
I was looking for an automation like this, thanks!
It’s an option… two tripwires one after the other can be used to know if the person goes into a room or out.
But please, correct me if I am wrong… a PIR sensor can “see” the body’s heat (or the IR radiation emited by a hot body) . So, why is needed that the body’s be moving to trigger? Even if the person is static, keeps hot…
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Here’s an explanation on how PIR sensors work. I can tell you for sure that all of the PIRs I used don’t detect motion if you are sitting still in a room.
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Nice I look forward to your impending tutorial ?! 
There are already a number of tutorials easily found by googling “arduino grid-eye” or similar.
This one for example.
Thanks have you tried it. To be clear this would remove the need for movement such as what is required by a pir sensor. Looks like they can do room counts with this thing…a little bit Orwellian hehe
Looks like a bit of work to get set up going through that tutorial especially if its your first arduino project but appears to be well documented. Maybe a good one for Dr z
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Yes, it will detect a person presence even when the person is asleep 
Also, you can control the wall lights closer to the person position in the room.
Never got to hang this one to the ceiling, so no personal experience.
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Did you ever see a working, reliable setup with this live? I somehow doubt that this works very well, otherwise I’m asking myself why is not everyone using this instead of motion sensors.
This is in no way meant as an offence.
Yes, it’s being used quite widely for presence detection. I know at least a couple of successful setups of my colegues. I myself have built a POC device with a very simple code but never got to meet the WAF to install it 
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Keep in mind that a PIR sensor costs less than a buck while this thing costs about 30-40 bucks.
I just used 2 VL53L0X to detect motion at the entry point at the top and bottom of my staircase.
I modified WLED codebase to support these sensors and to turn on / off an LED strip.
I considered using two of these at top and bottom to be able to track number of people on the stairs but thought it was more hassle than I need for now.
ESPHome also supports this sensor (https://esphome.io/components/sensor/vl53l0x.html). I did get a single sensor working on a NodeMCU running ESPHome and reporting the distance back to homeassistant, but I’m unsure if ESPHome can handle multiple of these on the same device because the sensors use the same I2C address and you need to change the address of 2nd sensor on boot if you want to read data from these on the same microcontroller.
Alternatively, you could look at VL53L1X, which has two ‘zones’ for being able to track direction of travel.
Though there is no ESPHome support for this (according to their site). I have ordered one myself to play around with but it hasn’t arrived yet.
See their example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91Ve-g0J2U
Still seems like this is not going to work for tracking multiple people passing under the sensor at the same time.
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If you flash your RF Bridge with OpenMQTTGateway or Tasmota, the number is limitless.
Hi, would you mind sharing some details on that “cheap crow alarm system” you have?
Well, honestly they don’t manufacture it anymore but i believe you can still find it online 2nd hand or unused on some sites. This is my panel and keypad…. I recently bought a non used one for 20 USD (panel only) for backup. I guess AAP NZ still sells this under AAP Elite S Brand and Model. This is the kind of alarm panel which has been used without any computer connection, only telephone lines… So, You need to add an AAP IP-Module on top of that.You also need to add an AAP IP-Module on top of that… It is also sold under Crow Brand. It supports 16 zone PIR and magnetic contact (all wired) sensors; if you want wireless sensors, that is still possible with an additional FW2 module card and FW2 Crow sensors(The price goes up of course in this setup).
After all setup, you need to upload a special firmware from AAP on IP-Module. I wrote a custom component for that in order to be able to use it on HA. You can find details for the custom component here.
All in all, the alarm can work standalone and HA connected. All sensor states are shown online on HA, including remote arming the alarm system and personally i am very satisfied for the performance and stability.
@burningstone Your automation based on starting a timer is exactly what the Tuya smart life app supports natively. The problem with it is that when the timer ends, it simply triggers the turning off (or whatever you configure) of the lights/switches even if there was some motion between the starting of the timer and the end of the timer.
Instead of that approach, I just created a trigger based on the time difference between the last-update time of the binary sensor for the motion sensor and the current time (from the time sensor, not now()). That way you can trigger your automation after a determined duration of motion sensor idleness. See the config here: Tuya motion sensor is not supported in Home Assistant
Good to see how you’ve augmented your motion sensor triggers with BLE triggers though. That could help with genuine absence of motion even when people are present (a big problem).
I don’t do it like this, it’s just an example on how I would do it with native HA automations.
No, the automation I suggested will restart the timer if motion is detected again after the timer started.
It will also restart the timdr if one of the “override” entities is still on when the timer finishes.