you should try espresense companion. Once you get the floor plan done, it rocks. This new piece will auto calibrate the signal level for each. Adding temp/humidity and motion works well with double and triple checking situations. Say your in your office and leave your phone to go to the restroom/kitchen. This allows you to give more weight to different items. Tile works well with the pets, phones/watches work for people.

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

that's some great info. I'll check it out!

Two comments: 1. You know your stuff. 2. You present it really well. Keep up the good work, and thank you.👍

@technithusiast

8 ай бұрын

I appreciate you and I’m glad you’re enjoying the content!

I recently found your channel, and like the concept based approach that you put into all of your content. Great work!

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

Thank you and I hope you enjoy the content!

@iot_enthusiast

Жыл бұрын

me too!

I have been playing with a few of these myself. This was a very honest review of the pros/cons of the ESPresence. Looking forward to seeing your next video on your use of these.

@technithusiast

11 ай бұрын

That video is already here! You can watch this one kzread.info/dash/bejne/p5hsubGacrzIf6Q.html and this one kzread.info/dash/bejne/gKenrbyJqcbJYqw.html

I don't link to phones for the reasons you list. I use multiple sensors. I use my Oura ring and my wife's bluetooth hearing aids. We both have Fitbit watches that work well. We have two floors in our home. It can be confusing to determine if you are in the upstairs room or the one below it. One solution is to place the sensors near the ceiling (or at least high) in the upstairs room and put them near the floor in the downstairs room. That vertical separation makes it easier to get distances right without overlapping. My next project is to automate the car arriving or leaving. Our car's bluetooth is off when the car is not started. So detecting the bluetooth would let me make a housewide announcement and open the garage door.

My guy, you gotta invest in a 3D printer and you don't have to break the bank either. I got started with an Ender 3 at the beginning of the pandemic and have since upgraded to an Ender 3 Max Neo which has a 150% bigger bed and auto leveling (you'll want that). They're open source, can be hooked into home assistant, and it's SOOOOOOO satisfying identifying a problem, coming up with a solution, using free CAD software to make it yourself or find a part online that'll work, printing it out, and you've just solved your very specific problem! AND you could make some nice cases for those esp32s!! ;) Hit me up if you want ideas or have questions!

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

I feel you on that! My place is pretty small and I have no where to put it but I definitely would like to get one to build custom cases, pcb boards and other custom pieces.

I use espresence as well. I don't have a mac unfortunately to do the IKR for mine and my wifes apple watches. Which would be ideal. We are more likely to walk around without our phone than our watches.

LOVE ESPresense! It makes my automations function with minimal effort. You can also add a temperature sensor to your ESPresense to provide you the temperature in each room.

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

I didn’t know that! Does it work if it’s in an enclosure?

@My427Cobra

Жыл бұрын

@@technithusiast I have purchased a 3D printer but have not yet tried to design an enclosure for my ESPresense sensors.

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

Once I get a bigger spot I would love to get a 3d printer. I didn’t realize how useful it is.

the why i went about to make it more accurate and not have detection when the person is in a different room. I created drop down helpers, for each room with options "empty, someone, person1, person2, etc" then in node red for each room, i check if there was motion in the room the last 20s, then when esp presence detects the tracker in the room, it updates the helper... so that eliminated the false positives, and made it very stable... then when a person has more than 1 device to track (watch & phone) i created a template sensor, that used the last updated device to update location.... i use this for custom notifications, allow music to follow me arround the house, and update dashboards ( for example if i open mobile app in a specific room, it has already navigated to correct part of dashboard....

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

Nice approach, but I didn’t quite follow how updating the drop-down helper for a room eliminates false positives? It feels like it’s about the same as asking HA to give me the immediate location?

@crushkitty

Жыл бұрын

@@technithusiast the dropdown can only updates its location, if there was movement detected in the specific room in the last 20s ( pir + ble) for example i walk into the living room, and right next to it is the kitchen, there was movement in the living room and not the kitchen, so the probability that im in the kitchen is very low... so the location gets updated living room...this allow me to be more generous with the distance, and dont need to fine tune it to perfection,

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

Fair point and makes sense. I don’t have a motion sensor but I can see how this works now thanks 🙏🏾

Hey man I'm not sure which video I was watching of yours but I heard you mention bluetooth proxy, and I wanted to throw "usbip" out there. You strike me as someone who might have a few devices around the house, and you can use usbip to pass through bluetooth radios to Home Assistant. Just a tool to keep in your pocket; In a lot of cases, this performs better, is more flexible and convenient than setting up bluetooth proxy

@technithusiast

7 ай бұрын

Thanks I’ll look into it 👌🏾

What about having 2 or 3 of the bluetooth presence sensors in a room in different corners, and when 2 or more sensors in a room indicate a devices (smart phone/watch) presence, then use that as the indicator that the person is in the room. When relying on one device per room, you run into what you were describing at around 4:08 in the video with the overlapping. Depending how you set the distance detection on the nodes, the chances of one room detecting presence on more than one node from an adjacent room would be slim.

@PointSchoolsNet

Жыл бұрын

You could also use a combination of mmwave and the bluetooth to help alleviate this as well. With bluetooth and mmwave, you should be able to connect both of those to one node.

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

I would like to get the mmWave but alas… it’s not in the budget. But I am waiting for the opportunity to try it out. I am working in a video that shows improvements using ESPresence.

I was working on a custom solution with ESP32 running in a cluster so they can have a majority decision in which room someone is but ultimately abondened the project because it is just too hard to track Apple products with just BLE because they change all the time their address and don‘t provide any identifiable data. I tried various tricks to track the devices but nothing was really working, so I gave up eventually. In addition to that it is really hard to get consistent results in smaller apartments due to the overlapping no matter how much you tweak the RSSI offsets. Is ESPPresence now able to track Apple devices reliably?

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

So far I’ve had more reliable result with my iPhone than my wife’s android. There definitely times when there’s a lag or mix up due to overlapping coverage but it’s been 2 months and I’ve had no issues on my iPhone in regards to hiding/switching the address(knock on wood)

@peterfotinis4645

9 ай бұрын

ESPresense supports IRK enrolment with iPhones devices now. You go through a Bluetooth pairing process which provides a fixed ID afterwards

Did you do the follow-up video? Can't find it

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

I got you fam. I have two videos on ESPresence coming out in in a few weeks! I’ll keep u posted 😁

I used this and it’s not very reliable. Hard to tweak the range,which rarely works. I used a tile to track where my dog is.

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

I agree! Even to this day I have some issues with setting the range appropriately but I suspect I am missing something fundamental with the integration.

I have run into so many issues understanding the calibration part of this. Do you know of a guide for idiots? Jumping between rooms makes for some really tough automating. :D

@technithusiast

6 ай бұрын

That’s a good question and I feel you on the difficulty level. When I initially did it it was purely trial and error guessing between the distance and absorption. I think there’s a visual tool now but I’ve only heard of it through legend and lore

But how will it know where you are? (Assuming you don’t have any phone or AirTag with you)

@technithusiast

9 ай бұрын

If you don't have a compatible bluetooth device on you then it wont know where you are. That's the downside of this device. Despite its drawbacks it does have many interesting benefits over its contemporaries. check this follow up video - kzread.info/dash/bejne/p5hsubGacrzIf6Q.html

Face detection with cameras does work well for this if you have the equipment. Definitely not cheap though (and who wants cameras on them 24/7 lol)

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

True. I think the next thing I may experiment with is frigate and cheap cameras

I found that it does not do a proper job with samsung devices. (due to samsung) the beacon app will work for a while and then stop transmitting

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

I found the same thing! My wife uses a Samsung and it would work for a short while and then stop..

I also recently found this channel and enjoy the content. I also love the way you present the information and your mannerisms. I have a 3d printer, how do I send you a private message?

@technithusiast

Жыл бұрын

Hey thanks! I don’t think KZread gave direct messaging but feel free to send me an email :)

It you have 2 esp32 boards (strategically) in each room you can rule out other room boatds galsr positives

@technithusiast

9 ай бұрын

True. Given enough hardware I could overcome some of these drawbacks but I try to scale vertically as much as possible before scaling horizontally. I created a video exploring this if you like to see 😬 Two unusual concepts to expand your automations: kzread.info/dash/bejne/ap-CybCap9upmrg.html

@armwrestling_nerd

9 ай бұрын

@@technithusiast I don't think much in vertical & horizontal. I'm just inventing things if something gets not as good as I need/want or items are too expensive for me to get. Writing code and reading specs modifying firmwares etc if needed. This btle proble (for me) is just a triangulation problem of a btle beacon. First thing is not to select s beacon that could change behavior/signal strength. Next step is to map your space by moving your beacon and save that data, suggestion is do this systematic as scan room 1 save as room 1 data, scan room 2 save as room 2 data..... When don scanning you just think of this as a vector problem. Each room will have its own unique numeric boundaries. This means if you know this you can calculate those boundaries and save them for future comparison. So now you only need a calculation service that takes each sensor value and return within which boundary the beacon is in. To save resources you could calculate the "center of mass" of each boundary and do comparisons that way. If your service is correct, it will be fast and high precision.

Spending 30$ is "biting the bullet"? Well I couldn't disagree more and once you learn how to use these boards, you can essentially duplicate most smart home products without the nightmare of having to pick and choose which devices you can currently buy because they don't come In a communication protocol you want or they use some proprietary app or api that may work now but wont work later, which history shows us this happens frequently with HA. It's far cheaper and will make your smart home bullet proof by learning how to make full use of these boards and invest in a 3d printer.

@technithusiast

7 ай бұрын

I appreciate your feedback even if it’s disagreeing 😛

Keep it simple s.... At work I just use the bluetooth Mac address from the cell phone. Everyone is stuck to their phone anyway.

first

It kinda looks like your mouth and the audio is not in sync

@technithusiast

Ай бұрын

Probably. I was still ironing out a lot of kinks in my earlier vids. Hell, I’m still ironing out kinks to this day…

@technithusiast

Ай бұрын

But I hope the content was good 👍🏾

@koalamusik

Ай бұрын

@@technithusiast It was

@technithusiast

Ай бұрын

@@koalamusik noice 👍🏾