> walking into a room turns on the lights via motion detectors
Do you know if there's anything good in this space yet for detecting presence (not just entry)? There are some spots in my home where I only want the lights on while I'm there, and I haven't found anything yet that can reliably detect that somebody's actually left a space other than Hiome (https://www.hiome.com), and that doesn't work for something not delineated by a doorway.
Room occupancy is something I’ve been playing with for several years, and I’m yet to find a really good solution to it. Having said that Hass has a Bayesian filter component which can give you a probability of occupancy based on a bunch of weighted inputs, for example if a motion sensor triggered in the last minute the room is probably occupied, likewise if the TV in the living room is playing video.
I keep toying with the idea of a bunch of BLE beacons in every room and then using signal strength triangulation in a mobile app to determine which room someone is in but that falls over the moment someone leaves their phone in a room.
I’ve just recently found out about ESPrensense [1], which does this, but running on ESP32 microcontrollers, so it should be much less resource intensive.
It's a good question! I'm super curious about that myself.
I do have a bed occupancy sensor, in the form of a SparkFun OpenScale under the legs. There was a Raspberry Pi in the room for speakers already, so it's just on that.
It needs some fancy calibration to deal with temperature changes, but I just constantly tare it when my desktop computer is active (and I'm home alone I'm certainly not on the bed). That's been super responsive and great. Bed transitioning from empty->occupied when bedroom is in night mode turns off all the other rooms again.
In general, I've found that it's a lot easier to track actions than presence. So computer activity, or a door opening.
I did just flash some ESP32s with this, which is a way to report bluetooth signal for a single device across a network of listeners. They can report direct to HASS via MQTT, but it also has its own persistent python thing to more carefully triangulate. No idea if it'll work reliably or fast enough to really be useful: https://espresense.com/
If you're willing to tinker, a camera that compares the current image with a "baseline" image and says it's occupied if there's enough change.
You'd have to have an IR or NIR camera to work at night, and take special care around things like doors/drawers/curtains that move.
Do you know if there's anything good in this space yet for detecting presence (not just entry)? There are some spots in my home where I only want the lights on while I'm there, and I haven't found anything yet that can reliably detect that somebody's actually left a space other than Hiome (https://www.hiome.com), and that doesn't work for something not delineated by a doorway.