“Hur Hur that’s what a timer on your phone is for dude”
Yeah but this was a smart plug that was going dusty in a drawer!
Anyway it’s not the notification that makes my brain tickle in that special way, but the fact that my HA takes note of who was in the kitchen when the air fryer was started and only notifies the floor with that person on when it’s done.
Now I’ve worked that logic out with a silly Air Fryer notification I can reuse it in all my other automations.
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
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…
Why not use mmWave presence sensors?
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 have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they’re worse for picking up the cats.
You can fine tune some and the Aqara FP2 seems to do a good job ignoring pets.
Yeah I’ve kinda found the sweet spot now to be fair, but I’m using an esp32 board and some dude’s yaml, so I’ve been groping in the dark a bit
