LifeBandit666 @ Lifebandit666 @feddit.uk

Posts

23

Comments

554

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah you certainly need more than one sensor. I have one per floor

Yeah I have a million Bluetooth devices picked up but I've only put 4 of them so far into my Ha sensors. Fuck knows what the others are, but we have soany devices in the house that I can't keep track, then there's the neighbours' stuff too...

Interestingly I stumbled across a YouTube short yesterday about hacking an android device from only knowing it's Bluetooth Mac address, so theoretically I could really piss off my neighbours if they drove me to it.

The secret is not caring it's 4m away as long as it says you're closest to that one. It's not accurate, it's a guess made with software.

As I've said I've sat at my PC on the front room and watched it say I'm in my bedroom and kitchen.

So for example my front room lights are based around an input boolean. They're triggered on by motion but back off by whether the TV is on, my wife's laptop is connected to the WiFi, the pc is switched off, and everyone's presence is not in the front room. I already did all that and now I have presence as well.

It used to be that my wife would be sat there on her phone and the lights would go out, now because her phone is on her person they stay on.

Like I say, they're not perfect but they are better than not having them.

I don't think I'll ever have my music follow me around the house.

Oh also try instead of basing automations around whether you are in a room, instead use "is not"

So for example when I get out of bed and get up for work by bedroom lights come on with my alarm. When I go downstairs and make a brew I am no longer in the bedroom so my automations turn off the lights in there. Is not "bedroom"

It's triggered by the motion sensor outside my bedroom door, then it waits for my presence to be anything other than bedroom. Since I'm moving around the house it'll trigger at some point.

Similarly my sleep automation turns off when the bedroom is no longer occupied. But that's when my wife gets up 2 hours after me. It's also triggered by motion, but then waits until my bedroom presence sensor no longer reads anything

You pair the device to a base station once to create an entity but you don't have to if you know the mac of your phone. So there's no pairing involved in the tracking.

You can use the HA app to create a beacon on your phone when you're on your home WiFi and not pair anything, just plumb the id into HA.

The speed is quite fast but there is still a lot of false positives. I've sat and watched mine and my wife's phones just pinging around the house, but if you add some "for X seconds" to your automations it becomes much more stable.

I've got 3 android phones and an iPhone tracked at present

Now you've got me wondering what marshal art Armish Ninjas would learn.

Like where I'm from in Yorkshire the marshal art is Ekky Thump, and in Scotland they learn Fah Kyoo...

Kung Plow?

For anyone else wondering how I'm keeping track of who's where, https://espresense.com/

I tried Room Assistant a year or 2 ago and it SUCKED. I have a 4 storey townhouse and had 2 nodes running Room Assistant and I could be stood next to 1, two floors away from the other and that's the one it said I was closest to.

The idea is that by detecting the strength of the Bluetooth signal, the node with the best signal was closest, but it just didn't work (for me).

Anyway espresence is better, especially because I've doubled up and I bought 4 esp32 boards with pins off AliExpress for under £12, and arrived within a week.

You connect the little chip to your pc and flash a firmware from Google Chrome, then hook it into your WiFi, go to its page and give it a name, and hook it into your MQTT.

4 boards later I have a node per floor.

Next I added our phones to it by pairing them to it, then deleting the pairing on the phone. Add the Bluetooth connection to HA config and you're away! Well...

So you have to connect what the boards say to what it means in HA yourself. You get "bedroom" off Espresence and have a Bedroom zone but you have to put the pieces together yourself.

I ended up making binary sensors for each room in Node Red. Did I leave the room? Who else is there, nobody? Ok mark it clear... You could just make helper switches and use them but I was feeling fancy. I've already posted recently about the Binary sensor.

But once you've done that, you just base your automations off the state of the switches you made.

So the age old "The front room motion sensor stopped detecting, should the lights go off?" question, now becomes...

Huh I must have stopped typing there...

...much easier to solve. I can still have the old "TV on?, wife's laptop connected to Bluetooth?" bits in, but having Bluetooth presence detection AS WELL makes it much more reliable, for a measly £12

Wouldn't even have to be ninjas tbh, but yeah fuck it, ninjas!

Meh, disagree.

Yup espresence

Espresence, it tracks Bluetooth and guesses which node it's closest to, it's guesses are really good

A month later and I have to say my automations are so much cleaner!

I started using HA's automation engine just to have a go. I bought some ESP32 sensors and set up ESPresence and thought it was time to reinstall Node Red.

What I've done is just made a presence page for all the complicated logic, then separate pages for rooms and automations.

So my Front room gets quite complicated so it has it's own page but hallways just require motion sensing and maybe illuminance, so there's just a Hallways page.

I've also discovered how to make Binary Sensors in Node Red so I've less need for all the Input Booleans I once used.

I'm a week in to having an espresence node on each of my 4 floors and it's just really useful. Motion sensor stopped tracking motion? Well is someone still on that floor? Yeah? Don't turn the lights off then...

I'm currently moving my HA automations back in to node red and there's some bugs when I forget to turn off the HA counterpart, but that will go as I clear out the automations.

It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.

To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.

And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.

But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.

So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.

I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren't all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.

Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don't do advertising. Pisses me off.

So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I'm curating a music collection I've pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it's feasible to replace Spotify but I can try

Congratulations!

That Baby will want some Peppa Pig (mine are over a decade old now so yes I'm out of date) in the future so your stack will come in useful again!

My Babies want Anime now

What was that noise from upstairs? Probably a murderer!

Is the noise it would make

Cool, I'll keep tinkering and let you know when I reinvent quantum computing

I've got a friend that I've basically lost over the last couple of years because he bought an Ender 3 in lockdown and now he's fat and pasty white because he just stays home making things with his printer.

Don't buy it and don't look into robotics, you don't need to make a automated robot that can kill other robots Luke.

Sorry I'm projecting lol

Now this is an idea I can get behind, send me some of the results :D

If you're looking for additional toys, a 3D printer is insanely useful for creating bespoke cases for your projects ;)

Oh look, the rabbit hole lol

This all sounds awesome.

My energy supplier (Octopus UK) rolled out these beta test monitoring gadgets that sit on the network and connects to my smart meter, super convenient, hooks straight in to HA with an add-on someone made.

Before I got one of those I was looking at the clamps Myself

This is good info thanks!