Oh ok got it…
Just in case anyone is interested, I wrote a “detailed” guide on how to setup room-based presence detection with Room-Assistant here.
5 Likes
I am looking at Room Assistant right now and it is quite promising, but you do need a reasonable distance between your rooms, otherwise you end up randomly jumping from one room to another.
I find motion detectors unreliable for presence detection. Too often I find myself sitting quietly on the couch reading a book (no tv on) and having to wave my hands around madly to get the light to turn back on. Of course, I could extend the delay in turning off the lights, but then that defeats the purpose of having automation and it costs me more, and is more annoying, than just using a switch to turn lights on and off.
I think a multi-device approach is likely best. Bluetooth, Motion and maybe some other device.
1 Like
For me it works quite good, but we have thick concrete walls that separate the rooms so I have almost no false positives and these I handle with distance parameters and priority in room assistant.
1 Like
@Burningstone I am looking at your github to get ideas.
I do like Room Assistant now I am testing it on my Dev Home Assistant with two Raspberry Pi’s. The only thing is, we tend to hang the keys on a hook in the hallway.
I don’t think iPhones can do BLE as a beacon, and my partner has an iPhone. Happy to be corrected if I am wrong there.
I think with the phone you can use bluetooth classic but I never tested this.
There are also Xiaomi Mi Fitnessbands that do BLE as well or if you wear slippers, you can cut a small hole and put the Nut mini in there, there was once a user who did this and his results were pretty decent.
Yes, I can use bluetooth classic. I think this means I cannot use BLE at same time, but that could work okay.
Has anyone looked at Happy Bubbles? I know the creator of the project has abandoned it now, but he open-sourced both the hardware and software.
This looks like it could be interesting if someone wants to revive it. ESP32’s are a lot cheaper than Raspberry Pi’s.
Motion sensors and Bluetooth won’t cut it in my opinion. Motion sensors don’t know you’re there if you are sitting on a couch. Bluetooth requires you to have your phone or some tracker with you. I don’t think the tech is there yet for the consumer market. However, I think these Grid-Eye sensors are the future.
It’s an infrared array sensor that will pick up your presence if on the couch or walk into a room without your phone.
1 Like
I have seen systems based on similar technology and they are ridiculously expensive for home use.
The Grid-Eye sensors appear to still rely on infra-red technology and the sensor seeing you, and seeing some kind of movement to differentiate between inanimate objects and living/moving objects.
Bluetooth needs a device with you, but as long as that device is in the room and not moving a system similar to happy bubbles can detect the device in the room. Unfortunately reliant on a device.
Geofencing can do home and away presence in a broad sense, but accuracy is questionable.
The bane of my existence at the moment is presence and room detection. Maybe the old light switch on the wall really is the best way to do things.
1 Like
You can buy these sensors for $40. It is infrared but its like a thermal camera it doesn’t require movement. Where have you seen these systems?
In my opinion they do! You can have a MiBand or put a tracker in your slippers, to make them less “invasive” and easy to have them with you all the time. It works fine for me for more than a year now.
There is also the cheaper Omron D6T, which comes in 1, 4 and 8 array versions. The single cell is about half the price of the grid-eye. There also appears to be an ESPHome custom component that someone has started to develop.
Think I might give this a go as an upgrade from my Xiaomi PIR Zigbee sensors in some rooms… I think a single cell would be enough in say a living room pointed at the sofas or for bed presence.
Did you try it?
1 Like
Did anyone try counting people in a room with the VL53L1X? Would be interesting to see how to set it up.
Have also been looking for a way to get room tracking work reliably, and since tracking of your phone BLE beacons seems hard due to random ID maybe the solutions could be to make it in reverse by adding BLE beacon support in the Home Assistant Companion app as sensors.
HA Companion Feature request: Report nearby BLE Beacons
1 Like
Have also been looking for a way to get room presence work reliably, and since tracking of your phone BLE beacons seems hard due to random ID maybe the solutions could be to make it in reverse by adding BLE beacon support in the Home Assistant Companion app as sensors.
HA Companion Feature request: Report nearby BLE Beacons
Any progress or update on the matter? I’m running into the limitations of PIR and it’s starting to severely limit the WAF when she’s waving her arms in the dark 
!
What about adding some conditions, like if TV is on, don’t turn off the lights?
No, sorry… I haven’t had chance to look yet.
I ended up just hacking most of my Xioami PIRs to have a 5 second update time and added some Boolean input toggles to enable/disable motion sensing, to fix the issues I was having.
I still hope to try the Omron sensors for bed presence detection at some point.