Why everyone is WRONG about room presence! 👀

in the last video there were quite a few comments and some really good questions there were also people saying Reed why are you using presence detection it's not accurate at all so I wanted to answer a bunch of your questions in this video as well as explain how I'm using presence detection because I'm doing some really cool stuff and maybe after you see how I'm using it you might be a believer or maybe not so the top comment in the video was from E-Rock and they said I'm excited to apply this to track my cat she loves finding new hiding spots it would be fun to see which room she's in and right when I saw this I immediately went to Amazon and bought a tracker for Luna and the one I got works really well because there's loops on each side so it was really easy to attach to her collar and it was on the outside part of her collar so Luna really doesn't even notice it even though it is slightly big but the battery life is four years so it should last a really long time it wasn't picking her up in every single room because the power it was giving off was a little bit low but you can use the app and up that power and that seemed to fix it even though that might make the battery life reduced just a little bit but it's pretty sweet I also saw some comments about the 3D printed case for the esp32 they couldn't make it or they couldn't find where to buy them well you can buy esp32s with a case already built on for a few dollars more and I'll link those down below they're actually smaller I haven't tried them myself but people say they work well a lot of people are asking if it works with Apple's air tags and unfortunately it does not work with air tags there's a whole list of things it works with and does not work with and I'll link it down below you can get some little Bluetooth trackers similar to what I put on Luna but yeah it's just annoying the biggest concern with room presence detection using Bluetooth is always carrying a device with you and it's a valid concern so I created something that makes it so much more convenient I'm mainly using my iPhone to track my Bluetooth presence around my house because it's the most accurate but I don't always want to carry my phone with me sometimes I like to take a break from my phone so when I put it down and put it on the charger my smart home automatically switches over and starts tracking my Apple watch and it works so seamlessly because I have an apple shortcut on my iPhone and right when I plug it into power it calls a home assistant Automation and then it makes that switch over and there's some stuff going on in the background using a template sensor and I'll get into that at the end because it's a little more technical but this works so well and it pretty much solves that problem because I either have my phone on me or my Apple watch for notifications so problem solved another major concern people have with room presence detection that I saw in the comments is accuracy and this is a valid concern because when I first start setting it up I ran into this issue as well but there are a few things you can do to really improve it so if you're using an Apple device I'm mentioned that you can get the Bluetooth ID by holding it near an ESP device and getting the Bluetooth ID that way but the way better way is to get the irk number not only will it not change or randomize the Bluetooth ID but for some reason it makes it way more accurate once I got the irk number from my iPhone and updated the ESP presence with it it just made it so good like it my iPhone is extremely accurate now so it took about 15 minutes to get all the irk numbers and all linked some articles on how to do that down in the description another thing you can do is move the ESP device off the ground for Less interference I had my ESP device in my bedroom on the ground and it wasn't really picking up my wife's phone just like you know maybe five feet away once I put it on my nightstand it worked perfectly so if you want less interference and better accuracy and all of that make sure you move it up off the ground and use the irk number if you're using Apple devices and then there's a last concern with room presence detection and it's why would you use this in the first place it's kind of slow to update with Bluetooth and all of that there's better sensors out there like PIR sensors that are faster millimeter wave that are a little more accurate and I made my main Channel video about using my HVAC system and automating it using a mixture of millimeter wave and this room presence and I think that's the best of both worlds because millimeter wave on its own it can't tell who's in the room and it can only cover a certain Zone like a certain area a room and it's very difficult to put them all over your entire house where room presence can cover a large area and sure it might not be pinpoint accurate like millimeter wave is but combining the two you can do so much more so it's not the only sensor that I use but I use it in conjunction with the other sensors in my smart home all right now for the juicy technical stuff if you're still sticking around you're brave and good job to you but this stuff is so much fun my template sensors and home assistant doesn't get much better than that so what it is is you're creating kind of like a virtual sensor it kind of works as like if you've used like virtual Boolean switches and everything but it's a little more intense because you're adding logic to the sensor let me give you an example of how this works with my HVAC system so with room presence detection I have I think there's seven rooms and I combine it into three different HVAC zones so if I were creating automations for every single one of those rooms like if I'm in this room or that room and that it would get complicated and I'd probably make some mistakes and it would take a long time to make all those automations but instead I made a template sensor to handle like the heavy lifting and then it never changes and then I can make really simple automation so let me explain let me show you some of this stuff so for the template sensor it's basically three if statements so if my phone is in one of the rooms then it will set it to HVAC master bedroom HVAC kitchen or HVAC bedrooms those are my three HVAC zones depending on which room I'm in I'm in one of those three zones then I can just have the automation say if the HVAC bedrooms is left if we left the HVAC bedrooms then turn the HVAC bedrooms thermostat back to warm or back to normal that's all you have to do because I don't have to check all the different rooms or whatever this template sensor is doing all that work for me and the other one that I'm using it for is what I mentioned earlier if my phone is on the charger then it will switch over to my Apple watch the way that that works there's an if statement if my charging is on that's just an input Boolean that turns on when the Apple shortcut triggers that automation I have another check to make sure my phone it has to be connected to an ESP device and the reason for that is because if I left my watch my Apple watch at home I took my phone in the car and I put it on the charger in the car then my the smart home would think oh use the Apple watch location and now I'm in the bedroom or whatever even though I'm in the car away from the house this read current room sensor this template sensor that I created I always use that for my location so I don't have to worry about if it's my watch or my phone or whatever I just always use this template sensor and then the next template sensor uses the output of the previous one anyways I had a lot of fun setting up all these automations and I know these were a little bit technical extremely technical I have some more basic automations I'm going to be doing as well so make sure you keep an eye out for those automation videos and hit that subscribe button if you haven't already thanks for watching

Channel: Reed's Smart Home

Views: 29,849

Keywords: espresense, room presence, smart home presence, presence detection, home assistant espresense, home assistant presence, home assistant tutorial, reed’s smart home, reeds smart home, smart home solver, smart home, home automation

Id: g53jpdWoXVk

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023