This is Surprisingly Better Than MMWave Sensors?

up here [Applause] [Music] good morning here's what you should know for today [Music] what's good everyone a few months ago I gave you my thoughts about es presence and whether or not it was worth it and though it does have some flaws on the whole I actually really liked it you can check out the link in the description or the card here to check out that video now that I've used it for several months I realized that it has become a core component in my automation arsenals and when acara and some noteworthy YouTubers release their own millimeter wave sensors I started to wonder what advantages and disadvantages Ian's presence had over a millimeter wave so let's put them together in a head-to-head battle to see which will be victorious is what I would say if I had a millimeter wave product why won't they let me be great since I can't really do a head-to-head battle um I'll just talk about es presence and how it shines brightest over a millimeter wave millimeter wave is excellent at detecting presence in an area it's so sensitive that it can even detect breathing I think that's rather impressive to be honest on the other hand es presence is not that sensitive it is more like a bludgeoning instrument it just tells you who's in a room that that's all it does and it does this by tracking bluetooth enabled devices which can be tied to a person as benign as that ability may be that one feature basically allowed me to create about five automations that I'm going to show you here this subflow was designed to send notifications to specific users using ES presence and the way this works is that it basically finds a Google speaker in the room where the use is located by doing this I'm actually able to choose whether or not a specific person should get a message or if it should be relayed through to the entire house and if home assistant can't find that given user then by default the message will just play throughout the entire house now this is extremely useful because when automations need to alert me of their progress or simply need to update me about information that I'm looking for it always plays specifically where I am this means I never have to create automations with a bunch of conditions to play in different places even more convenient is that automations are Tailor Made For The Individual it's almost like having a butler that follows you around if I need to hear calendar updates it's not going to play everywhere it can just know that hey this person is in that spot let me deal with them now as accurate as millimeter wave can be it won't be able to provide that kind of experience I mean like you kind of can depending on your situation and the context but it won't be easy I think Reed kind of put it best remember that millimeter wave sensor I told you about well if it detects someone and there's no Bluetooth phone or watch in this room then by deductive reasoning I can probably guess it's my kids so you could use millimeter wave with complex logic and kind of do a process of elimination to determine where a message should be sent for example if it's past 10 pm millimeter wave can ignore the presence detection in let's say my kid's room where it's unlikely I'll be there at that time so again this experience is just not the same but you could do it with millimeter wave now if your smart home knows specifically who's in a room then theoretically you can program preferences for automations lights can be set to specific colors based off of based off of the occupants thermostats can change based off of who's in the room your whole automation setup and experience can basically be dynamically changed and altered based off of who is in a room or the combination of people that's in the room I think that's pretty dope now there's no no workaround for this experience using millimeter wave the closest equivalent would be to create a preference based system that is based off of the number of people it detects in a room but this may work in some cases but really it's just not the same it's not the same with the previous two automations you can create millimeter wave Alternatives kinda however this is an es presence exclusive since it is presents track devices via Bluetooth it means that home assistant can tell you which room your device is in I created a switch Helper and created a simple automation that would blast all of the Google home speakers with the location of the device whenever the switch is turned on turn on find Michael's phone sure turning on the find Michael phone you're currently in the office nice I think I've only used it once ever but you know at least it's there that's something that it can do that millimeter wave can't oh wait um I should probably mention that in the description there's a link to a GitHub page called chaperone that have copies of some of the automations I talked about here but just as a word of caution you'll have to update them to fit your needs and your system specifically like for instance a happiest presents you may not you may have es presence but your rooms may be different updated accordingly this last Advantage takes users preferences and dials it all the way up and it's best achieved if you know who is in a particular location by incorporating GPT you can have your responses be personalized to you so if you've been following home assistance like year of the voice and all of stuff that they've been coming out with you've probably seen the demo where they have their home assistant uh assist based basically mimicking the mannerisms of Super Mario hi what is your name it's Amy Mario similarly you can give your automations a bit of personality the same way that Tony Stark's for AI Friday or Jarvis had two different mannerisms now this is not something I'm personally interested at the moment though I feel you know once this becomes more like like GPT and AI becomes a little bit more mainstream and it kind of finds a very comfortable place within Smart Home Technology then yeah as a first world problem I made head down this route but technically you can do it now you can try now and that's made possible using ES presence now though it would be a little bit more interesting if you could dynamically change the voice to go along with that personality but again Beggars can't be choosers at least we have this now as dope as all of these automations are there are some obvious and not so obvious caveats starting with the obvious caveats you need to have a tracked device like all the time now for some this is not a big deal and for others this can be very annoying I think Reed came up with a really dope solution what's really cool is if I put my phone on the charger my smart home automatically switches over and starts tracking my Apple watch and what room it's in instead of my phone so I don't have to always carry my phone with me it's pretty sweet I thought that was pretty clever I'm gonna steal that from you read thanks essentially you can do stuff like that where it may be less of a burden but bottom line is that it's not tracking you biologically it's tracking like devices so you need to be Tethered to something and you may not want that and that's okay so whether it's a phone or a watch these presence need bluetooth enabled devices to track and it doesn't know technically if that person holding the device is actually the intended user so that's another thing to kind of watch out for so this means that you could have scenarios where a spouse may get an experience that's intended for you but you left your phone or your watch behind this kind of leads to the other obvious flaw if you do have something that is sensitive then you know someone can just take your stuff and then now they have access to that so don't do anything sensitive with es presence just leave it for more General stuff now one not so obvious downside is that it isn't fast or reliable as millimeter wave I mean like technically that is obvious after you have it but in practice really it's not obvious going into it it's a millimeter wave knows for certain that there are people in a room and it does this pretty much instantly however he is present on the other hand can take several seconds to register that you're in a new area and depending on the layout of your house it may actually think that you're in a different room if the different you know radar signals overlap again re did a lot of experimenting with this and he found a way to kind of hone this down and make it more reliable I haven't tried it out yet but I would say I'm going to leave a link to REITs video so but despite all of these shortcomings I still think es present is worth it and has great advantages that can't really be achieved with millimeter wave now if you like this video I would appreciate it if you guys could subscribe and or like or both let me know in the comments what automations you would create with es presence okay bye foreign [Music]

Channel: Technithusiast

Views: 32,417

Keywords: montaque, tips and tricks, home assistant tutorials, node-red tutorials, smart home, home automation ideas, motion sensor, presence sensor, mmwave, location tracking

Id: ud8WOaBYbOA

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023