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Posts
23
Comments
554
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I already have motion sensors everywhere but I also have cats. They make it seem like there's people wandering around the house all the time.

    I've placed a lot of them on top of door frames that seem to miss the cats, but in the front room there's sofas for them to climb up on which means they still get picked up.

    I have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they're worse for picking up the cats.

    So what I'm trying to do is add more sensors so HA has a better picture of who is in the house, and when.

    To give you an idea, yesterday I took my wife to a Dr appointment, my kids are at their grandparents, but when I was sat on the car waiting for Wifey I noticed my kitchen lights were on in the app.

    The Drs turned into the hospital and I was out for a good 4 hours, but got home and added "Is anyone home?" to my lights automations.

    The cats don't need lights

  • I read comments! I watch a lot of videos about self hosting services and the comments is where you find other people who have followed the video and struggled at some point. If you're lucky it's a common sticking point you're stuck on and someone in the comments has a way of fixing it.

  • This actually sounds like what they're doing at Home Assistant.

    Buy a HA Yellow or whatever, plug it in to your network and turn it on. It loads up and you log in on a web page on your phone. Install an app, sign up for Nabu Casa and get your services working outside the network.

    And it'll pick up a lot of what's already on your network and set it all up for ya.

  • Anyone wondering about tuning:

    Absorption is the amount of "stuff" between 2 base stations. Increasing the value seems to "attract" Bluetooth to it.

    So if you're sat next to a station and it's saying you're nearer another, increasing absorption seems to help with that.

  • I believe the other comment is correct, there's 2 ways of adding Bluetooth presence, one is espresence which I'm using and the other is a less feature filled version in esphome.

    I have done a lot of moving my esp boards around though to improve it. They seem to work better when they're in different locations.

    So for example I had one at the top of my stairs but I've moved it across the room, further away from the one on the floor below which was at the bottom of the same stairs. I also moved that one into a room and higher up because it was interfering with the one on the floor below that.

    And that one I moved to the other side of the room, and the one on my ground floor has been dropped to floor level instead of sitting at waist height.

    Point being, if you're putting it onto already placed sensors, ymmv

  • Yup exactly that.

    I only figured it out after fine tuning for hours to try and stop it. But the fine tuning I did while I was getting interference has actually made espresence better.

    It was bouncing around stations a lot, but by turning the absorbsion up on the station in my front room it's sorted all that out and now it's accurate.

  • The point I think is that while most locks are really easy to pick relatively, the people that it's really easy to pick to, aren't the same people robbing your house.

    The ones that sit and practice picking the locks are the ones that install them, or come out when you've misplaced your keys and get you in the house.

    The robbers are mainly opportunists that wander around looking for open doors and windows, knock to see if you're home then try to force a way in.

  • I was recently party to my wife's friend telling her she had held it and Wifey saying she hasn't done that.

    Then she was all about it, had lots of fun too, so who am I to judge?

  • Don't know why you've been down voted but don't worry I put you back up to positive.

    Your toaster automation sounds like what I had to do with the old dishwasher. It would finish the cycle but not stop, so it would continually try to keep up to temperature for some reason.

    So I had my notify automation for when it was done and then I had it switch off when the power dropped.

    Minor inconvenience to that setup was having to turn it back on again when I wanted to use it. I didn't wanna have to go under the sink and wade through all the shit in there to get to the plug so I used Google "Hey Google, wash up"

    But we have a new one now so I can leave it on.

    I also have the washing machine notification. At present it announces when the motion sensor in the kitchen picks up movement and the washer is finished, and sends a notification to the phones in the house when the announcement is made with "I emptied it" and "Ignore" so you walk in the kitchen, get shouted at to empty the washer and a phone notification.

    But I am planning on having the same presence detection pick up who triggered the motion sensor and only notify that phone, just haven't gotten around to it just yet

  • how do you know when to send the notification btw? Did you configure some automation or script that just says how long until notify?

    When power drops below a certain wattage I figure the cooking it complete. I've set it to 20 because it seems my air fryer drops to 24W every few minutes (when it's reached temp I guess) and my rice cooker drops below 50W when it's on the Keep Warm cycle.

    So above 50W it checks the room and below 20W it calls a notification from the people that were in the room.

    Also, as a minor annoyance, I could only flash the board from chrome when connected to a WINDOWS machine which I find pretty nasty 🤢, but I may be in the minority there.

    Yeah I was a Linux-boy for a decade before a friend gave me a gaming PC he made out of spare parts for me. His one stipulation was NO LINUX so I'm stuck with Windows. But I get ya.

  • Just coming back in to say that yeah, now I've used it as a primary trigger instead of a secondary check it seems I'm all over the place in Bluetooth land...

    I don't have a motion sensor in my bedroom. I do have an old phone on a charging stand that I use as a Smart Clock, and the camera of that can be used as a motion sensor. It's pointed at my head when I'm in bed so it's not in an optimal motion sensor position... Just setting the scene for you.

    Now I had an automation that turns bedroom lights on based on motion so when I wake up in the middle of the night for a pee I have a lamp that turns on for five minutes.

    Well of course I wanted MORE from this extra from my clock, so I've added presence in the room as a primary trigger of my lamps.

    I'm stood in my room watching my lights popping on and off again every 30 seconds...

    Not great as a primary trigger, more a secondary check.

    Anyway I'm gonna try and change it by adding "in room FOR 30 seconds" to my sensors, seems to be helping so far.

    Also limiting reporting distance in the settings for each node to 4-6 meters.

    Or maybe stop trying to use it as a primary sensor lol