The BEST Smart Home Room Presence Detection I've Tried!
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- čas přidán 7. 02. 2022
- I recently heard about a new project ESPresense: a Bluetooth tracker running on relatively cheap ESP32’s that will give you room presence as you move around your smart home. In this video, I show you how it works, how to easily set it up and how to integrate it into Home Assistant for whole house room tracking for use within Home Assistant Automations!
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Ive just found your channel, because im thinking of moving away from Hubitat to HA. I watched this and my jaw dropped... Individual room presence!! tied in with motion sensors, finally sorts out the pet issues with turning on lights! IF I CAN GET IT TO WORK! awesome work, thanks.
THANK YOU! I've been waiting for something like this for a while!! More on this topic is always welcome.
Really cool, I would love to see this on the interactive floorplan, position tracking, for a warehouse cause use. Track the movement of equipment and pallets or carts, etc.
Haha... You said equipment, I read staff... :P
Awesome video! I’ve played around with things like Room Assistant before, never with much success. I’d love to see another video on the applications of this tech. Always looking out for ideas. Now I need to go watch your videos on general presence detection as I’ve had little success with that either, after having spent weeks trying to get the Monitor project to work for me.
Thank you so much for this. I have a box of ESP32s waiting for a project and this is it! A follow up on suggestions re automations would be much appreciated. Keep up the good work. Thanks again.
Thank you man, have fun!
Set up my whole house (5 sensors, 2 waiting) in less than 2 hours, thanks for the video!!!!!
Glad to see you also gave it a go.. Did this a couple of weeks back. Works well!
Glad you've already tried it Riaan and working well for you!
Thanks so much for this very helpful and well thought out guide Lewis! Just used it to setup some D1 minis I got to use as room presence trackers. Appreciate you!
Appreciate you for watching buddy!
Im loving this project! I definitely would love to see a follow-up video on this.
What would you like to see?
I think some creative automations using this should be pretty useful. Like a top x automations video :)
@@EverythingSmartHome I would love to see using presence to direct a TTS notification to the nearest Echo/Google Assistant/Sonos speaker
@@EverythingSmartHome map overlay
Have wanted a campus or business building map dashboard for a secretary for a long time: one look and they could see where in the building anyone is - out one at the exit and you can see what time they left. It’s all about good data and good UI.
@@EverythingSmartHome how do you capture the iPhone?
Nice... Will be coming back to this video and make use of it when I am getting around to setting up my home with smart home devices. Only just begun.
Let me know how it goes!
This is an amazing video and concept! I'm a bit late to the game here with Home Assistant and ERPresence. I just finished installing 17 ESPresence devices around our home and they work so well! You may also want to do an update to this video as they have added the ability to 'enroll' devices with the EsPresence itself (especially Apple Devices) - it makes it so much easier to manage! Thanks for the great videos and ideas - I'm now a faithful subscriber and member and look forward to what you have in store for your followers! I wish you continued success.
Your production quality and content are excellent! congrats and thank you!
Thanks so much, really appreciate that! Its something I take a lot of pride in and always trying to improve!
Lewis awesome video! I have been loving espresense!
I would love a follow-up video on automations!! I have had this setup for awhile but not done any automations for it yet.
That's good to know, how are you finding ESPresense so far?
Please do some automations using this like turning off the lights when you leave the room. Will be most helpful. Thanks
Hi, This is a really cool project and I've already buy some ESP32 to start with it. It would be great if 1. this is merged with ESPHOME 2. you could make a video on conditional automations to get this working 3. any blueprint to HA would be also great
Loving this so much better than Room Assistant! I am using this to track my dog with a Tile Tracker and so far it is working great. One thing that would be super helpful to add to this would be to map this to a device tracker so that you can actually tie this to a user for home/away state.
Another great Home Assistant video! I would also love a follow-on video (as I suspect everyone does). I did wonder if ESPresense can triangulate, since I can't exactly put the ESP32 in the center of the room.
This is exactly the video I was looking for after your Q&A video talking about your lights coming on automatically. I really wish this was integrated into ESPHome too because it would be nice to wire a cheap PIR sensor into the ESP32s as well to trigger the lights to come on with the sensor and keep them on with ESPresence.
Yeah I agree it seems they are trying to incorporate sensors into ESPresense which I can would be beneficial but seems like reinventing the wheel - that's why ESPHome would be great with this
@@EverythingSmartHome Any idea if they plan to integratie within ESP Home? This would mean much more enthusiastic users I guess...
This is sick! Looks like I found a new project. Thanks for the video!
Thanks for watching!
It would be great to see some NodeRed automation samples with this presence detection.
Thankyou for this video - seems so simple. I think I will try it in rooms that have limited movement, such as living room (whilst watching TV) etc.
Yes I've been looking for that too. It might be worth trying HA in conjunction with node-red since it seems to have more support for this kind of thing at the moment.
I'd like to see some practical examples about this project! Great video, as usual!
Great video! Love to see a followup on this one! Thanks in advance!
Nice.
Thanks for making this video, I was really hoping for one on presence detection!
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@EverythingSmartHome And of course I would very much enjoy a follow up video to this one.
Fantastic Job, it works very well for me, thanks
Well done, and thanks for this!
I would love to to see ESPhome having this built in! I am going to do this for opening my garage when I start my motorcycle or ride home
Good video. I have been using ESPresense for a few months now and I found it more user friendly than Room Assistant that I could not get to work for the life of me. I still need a few more ESP32'S for full coverage. I only have the one automation using this and that is to determine which room I am working in so when a call is received/made the music on my echo device stops and starts again when it ends. I also intend to add a PIR to each so as to reduce the number of devices in each room. Hoping that there may be support for bme280's in the future rather than just for dht11 (maybe 22's).
Amazing project! Please do more videos on applications
Sweet! This is great - exactly what I was looking for. I was looking at Room Assistant since I have some RPis sitting around. Some of which I'm thinking of making into media players (plug a speaker and run vlc)
Good luck with it!
well explained for advanced users I like that, subscribed
Yes! This is the video I have been waiting for! So good.
Thanks Jeff! Have you tried this out yet?
@@EverythingSmartHome I have not tried it yet. But I did grab some esp32s a while back so I could. Going to work on it this week
Nice to see two of my favorite youtubers chatting with each other. Learned a lot from you guys. Keep up the nice work. Excellent video Lewis.
Thanks man! Appreciate it!
Great video. Thanks
excellent video! saved a lot of time for me
I never thought my fitbit would help me to be too lazy to turn off devices when I leave the room.
Anyways, great video and amazing idea. Cheap enough to simply try it out and see how it works.
Thanks for the very clear instruction, just got them up and running! 1 thing I noticed is that my ESP32's are rebooting quite often with ESPresense running on it. In the beginning every 15-20 seconds (Debug exception reason: Stack canary watchpoint triggered (BLE Scan)). After turning off the option 'Query devices for characteristics' this bug was gone, but they still reboot quite often (longest run so far is 30 minutes). Will see whether I can find the root cause.
I see home assistant video I click! Cheers for the content
A man of culture
Interesting. The perk of room-assistant is the auto-detection (phone doesn't have to be "on", etc.). I've had really good luck with it so far, but always willing to give something "new" a try!
Be interested to hear your results;
Those are updating Esprensense with version v3.x.x, note that "Send to rooms topic" will be deprecated.
Change state_topic: "espresense/rooms" to state_topic: "devices/johns_iphone" so you will not get "not_home" in topics while checking sensor in developer tools. Instead you will see correct room name which you set, for instance bedroom.
Oh that's awsome, I already have a bunch of D1 minis running DHT22 and PIR sensors but I see at 5:14 in the video that ESPresense supports it natively to. Will be ordering a bunch of ESP32's to upgrade the current nodes to use this instead!
I'd maybe be cautious around that, not sure how well it works!
Thanks a lot Lewis for the video. I would love to see a follow up video on how to use this in automations. Here is what i want to use it for. I have a 5 months old baby often sleeping in baby stroller. and we will take him to different rooms for sleep. Now, i have a input boolean (baby sleeping) and input select where the values are the rooms that the baby is sleeping. Then my announce script via alexa will not play notification in the room that the baby is currently sleeping. So, currently i have to select every time where the baby stroller is, which is annoying and we sometimes forget to do that. I was thinking to hook up a bluetooth to the stoller (like a watch) and use ESPresense to change the value of the input select automatically. Should work.
Amazing ! Just what I needed ! Thanks a ton
Glad it helped!
@@EverythingSmartHome first of all . thank you once again coz it will make my life much easier. so I got things working and I set up my iPhone X with it. after I leave the room and once the connection is lost , it doesn't connect to the phones bluetooth again when I re enter the room , only when I restart the device or reset the bluetooth on my iPhone , the connection is re-established . Also I tried to set up my wife's phone as well ( same model- IphoneX ) but the device ID is exactly the same and now the esp senses both our distances and cannot differentiate . HELP!!
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! I want this to turn off the lights if nobody is in a room for more than 10 minutes.
Good luck!
Another great video Lewis, clear and easy to understand as always 🙂
Tempted to order a 3-pack of ESP32s and give this a go...
I'll just need to remember to always have a suitable Bluetooth device on me then 😉
Definitely worth a go 😅
Another really useful video. I am testing two nodes at present. iPhone 12 is working well and pretty solid whereas Watch drops out periodically, even though I'm just 1m from the node. Response is not really fast enough to use for lighting automation though and I'm not sure what else I could is for. All the same, it's a nice idea and well implemented. If I move to using this on a permanent basis I'll probably go with the ESP32 D1 mini due to the more compact form factor.
Yes I mentioned right at the beginning not to rely on this for turning lights on etc 😅 are you sure your picking up the right beacon?
this seems like a good idea
Lewis this is fantastic! I've been trying various methods for room presence for years now, and they have all failed. This appears more reliable. Can't wait to give it a try. My esp32 boards just arrived.
BTW, there is a link to a written article in the description, but I can't find the write up on your website. Is that coming?
Thanks again!
Thanks for a great video. I had lots of trouble finding an app that would identity the id of my Apple Watch. There is an easy workaround though. Open MQTT Explorer and you can see all the messages the espresense is sending. The other advantage is that I realized the "tile" devices I keep in my wallet and on my keyring could be used as well as my watch so I could actually set up sensors for those and figure out which in which room I misplaced my wallet.
Thanks! Yes, follow up please. 😁
Great system and explanation. The only downside by implementing it to smartswitches, would be when switches often are mounted close to the door of a room and therefore would report closest if you only walk past a room? Or atleast thats just a theory.
Great video. When will you be posting the follow up on how you use ESPresense in your implementation?
Seems like a really promising solution to fine-grained presence detection! Very interested in seeing what these look like when put into a case and connected to power. All too often these things are ugly, ugly, ugly, and I’m not plugging ~10 ugly devices in every room of the house. Forget “spouse approval factor” - *I* don’t want to see them all over the place. It’s fun to geek out and play with toys on a workbench, but for permanent install, aesthetics matter.
Agreed!
Yes, that works ! :) OK, got into some trouble finding the bluetooth mac addresses of my iOS devices as I don't have an Androïd phone (hmmm actually I have, well my wife has. Well she wasn't home at thet moment). So I used Acrylic BLE Analyzer (5 days trial). Now I'm onto trying to make something in Nodered.
One of your best videos. Thanks. You should definitely make a follow up video and talk a little more about IPhones and IOS devices.
Thanks!
Definately doing this when it gets to Hubitat!
Wow, impressive!! BLE is a future solution!
Thanks!
interesting. this reminds me that how i found your channel was when I looked for room occupancy detection and found the bed project.
Allll the way back when
I have a detached workshop and have been considering a BT presence to trigger a smartlock as I approach. Since HA isn't 100% reliable, I'm reluctant in investing in a smartlock. I might try the project, just triggering some notification before I actually purchase the lock. BTW, great video.
Yes please! I'd like to see examples of automations using this, with MQTT. Also, the espresence/install page is /firmware now.
Thank you!
Now I have to say it but 1 minute into any of your videos I4m already trying to catch my breath. Breathe mate ! :)
I'm having trouble finding my device id for my apple watch on esp terminal also. device not found. been on this for hours..
Very cool project and great video. I already bought some ESP32 and have been playing around with ESPHome ble tracking without much luck.
My impression was that it failed because iPhones, AirTags and the latest Tiles (what I have available) use bluetooth MAC address randomisation to prevent everyone else from tracking you over time and space. If someone with malicious intent were to enter your fitbit MAC address, they would be able to track you around the world, albeit only in places with hackable computers and other hardware using BLE.
There is an option inside of ESPresense to help with the randomisation!
@@EverythingSmartHome I wish there was a better explanation of what this was. My house is full of Apple devices, could not reliably track my Apple Watch at all. The page lists using "continuity footprints" but no where is there a practical discussion of HOW to use them.
Nice video. Definitely would love a follow up. Also curious on how to automate a bathroom light and also would love to hear on how you did the presence sensor automation for each room with the PIR sensor I'm unable to do it. Are you placing the Sensor under the door header is it
Great video. I’ve set 3 up, and now need to buy more to fill out the rest of the house. “No one in this room for 5 minutes, turn off lights and devices”
Thanks for this video. Could you do a comparison with room assistant for example?
I think ESPHome has a presence / RSSI signal / etc but i liked how ESPresense changes values of position for each device on HomeAssistant! Hope those projects merges because at esphome there's no need for MQTT configuration and we can use ESP32 chips for other functions at the same time
It does but not as advanced as ESPresense like you say, would love to see them merged
Absolutely agree. Great project and would love to try, but I won't for the moment as I my system works perfectly with many ESPHome devices over wifi. I would literally have to set up MQTT only for ESPresence. Very much hoping for the merge or a version that allows both mqqt and tcp.
This looks to be a much cleaner solution to what I but together last year with ESPHome's ble_rssi platform and a bunch of Node Red flows to compare the signal levels.
Nicely presented , this is my default channel for HA. Thanks a ton , i am on it now….
Too kind 🙏
Yes please a step by step set up Guide
Thank you for all the good content! There is now an HA integration, which makes it possible to do bluetooth proxy device tracking in combination with ESPhome. It is called ‘Bermude BLE’. Would you be so kind to make a tutorial about it?
Hi! Thanks for your video. Have you explained how to set up your motion light automations in one of your videos yet? Yours appear to be very on point for both directions, while my setup (ikea motion sensor) has an updating cycle of about 3 minutes and is not very reliable. Thanks!
Hi,
Thank you for the video. Could you please show us how this software could run on existing ESP 32 devices? Will it interfere with their normal operation? Could we use ESP 32 lighting fixtures (like Yeelight, it is always powered thanks to FlexSwitch), to run such software?
Would love to see a follow up on this!
Thank you for a great video! This works great if you have one floor, but if you have multiple floors, then the trackers flick back and forth, for example from garage to 4th bedroom, because the 4th bedroom is above the garage. Is there a way to distinguish it base on altitude?
Amazing project, never heard of it before! Curious about a follow up, seeing you walking room by room with different devices (Watch, iOS, Android) to see how it really works. And maybe some suggestions or tips from followers for some creative automations as well! Almost pressing the "buy an esp32 for each and every room in the house" - button 🙈
IOS, watchOS and even Android is a mess as they've got privacy protections for Bluetooth to avoid tracking, so that sucks :(
@@alexcruzfarmer2090 Just started using the BLE emitter from the HA companion app and turned the power to high. Seems to be working better but not sure how itll effect my battery
@@migo040 awesome. It’s a bit hit and miss if I’m running it since I use the Home app :(.
I’d really like to see a follow up video showing how to automate in HA to turn lights on and off in conjunction with a motion detector please 🙏
O WOW this is amazing.... i was considering room assistant, but now with the chip shortage, adding a pi zero in each room it gets a little expensive
Yeah I agree!
Edit:
Got it working stable. going to flash all my ESP's with espresense, plan is to turn off the lights when all devices are "out of reach" #energychallange. Hope i can come up with the automations
I'm going to give this a try. Got a bunch of 32's just laying around. Been tinkering with a project like this but the esp's keep going offline somewhere between 10 minutes and 24 hours.
Awesome video. Can you make a guide video with Raspberry pi zero w and room assistant.
I managed to use this, in a combination with a node red flow… to allow my music follow me around the house… i start playing on one alexa… and ask “alexa follow me” that flip an input boolen to on… then when i move to another room it change the source…. Really sooo many possibilities for this!!!
That's awesome, well done!
We need this for the Shelly Plus 1
Would love to see a follow up video for this usage.
Thanks Lewis! Just wondering, what's everyone using for android broadcasting? I tried HA companion app as well as Beacon scope but they don't seem to reliably sending out the signal to the ESP. I'm using a Samsung S10+. Iphones with room-assistant seems to be working a lot better than android. Any suggestions?
Got this set up and really really happy! Just a query - the final room I'm in is the final state reported to the sensor. Is there a way to default back to an "away" setting for when you actually leave the house? If you go into the back yard etc?
Absolutely awesome video! Also so glad there is a option for iOS devices. Tried a ton of options and was terrible for apple based devices.
Also support the idea to merge with ESPHome. Have a couple of motion sensors already part of my ESP32s. So would also make sense for me.
Keep up the great work!
There is a way to accelerate the refresh from the iPhone.. is a little slow:(
my iPhone is showing a different MAC address inside the device from in the espresence logs. Do iPhone rotate the MAC address for bluetooth? I know they do this for WiFi.
Thanks, for this video, wonderful; but I think I missed the part where the binary sensor shall be put into the config
Do you mind doing an updated video of with the new ESP firmware which the UI is different?
I am glad that this works for you. It seems very unreliable in my usage. I have it tracking my phone, my watch (both Apple) and two Tiles. Even though they are all on my person they show either different rooms or not_home. The phone seems the most consistent but I can have it in my pocket about two feet from the office ESP and over the course of an hour it will show not_home for 40% of the time. Are there any setting you changed other than the obvious maximum distance.
I have the very same problem. The polling of the distance seems VERY slow (running HA on a raspberry pi 4) I've added 4 devices (as I couldn't find the MAC of the apple devices - so just added them all with unique names to work out which was which) and the locations vary from 1-4 metres even when all the devices are together
Hi. Great video! At the moment I wonder whether this functionality is still working or better to say would it be able to use it with the new Bluetooth proxy component.
do you have any experiences with that?
Would be great with a follow up on this.
I have 2 esp32s and they're running great. When my BT watch gets closest to one of the ESP32s it changes the state of the BT watch to that room, I can see it does this in the "developer tools" tab. Problem is, I can't use that state for anything. When I add an automation I can't add a trigger, which triggers when the BT watch is in one of the states. I'm I doing the automation the wrong way, or do I need to change some config? I can't seem to figure it out. Hope you know what to do:)
This video has been fantastic for getting me up and running with ESPresense on esp32s. I followed your exact set up and all works great. Senors (base stations - 3 x ESP32s) working with MQTT and beacons (apple watches) each set up in the config.yaml per this video (but using irk's). However, I'm not clear though on how I create automations using these sensors - e.g. when my daughter leaves her room (her apple watch leaves) her light switches off. There is mention of the possibility of a follow up video on that...any news? thanks!!
Thank you for the great video! What is the state displayed when I am not home, so when the device is far from the esp32?
I thought about using this with only 1 esp32 to track when I come back home and I am in front of the main door, but I would need a state change to trigger an automation. Any thoughts? Thank you in advance!
Thanks for this video Lewis! I'm curious if you've noticed any wireless interference problems on the 2.4 band? I once setup Room Assistant on a few RPI zero w's. It ended up causing issues with some of my smart light switches. I was graphing wireless stats in graphana and noticed that with room assistant running I had a high level of retries on the 2.4 spectrum.
Thanks! I haven't but if you've been keeping up with the smart home protocols videos we talked about the importance of a strong wireless network if you want to have a lot of wireless IoT devices!
This looks like a great future project that I would love to tackle. This may not be the initial use for it but I would love to put this in my parents house to use as a sort of "last known/current room location" for their phones and devices! My mom and sister are infamous for forgetting where they put their phones and devices and have used the find my device features a lot! I'm wondering if it would be possible to use these ESP32's to help narrow down which room they would be in.
Haha that's a great use case I never even considered!
I've watched a few of your videos and they are all fantastically well done - so thank you very much for them.
As to this approach it looks to be very good for how it works, but it has a fatal flaw in that it requires people to effectively to have a 'tag' with them at all times. I don't have a fitbit and nor do I carry my phone around with me all the time in the house (especially not in the shower :-)). Moreover you have to register each device for the thing to work.
The basic issue is that presence detection shouldn't really put requirements on the people it is meant to detect. Are there no passive options (such as thermopile sensors) that could solve this problem instead?
Once again, it's no criticism of your video (which is brilliant), it's just that the tech doesn't fully solve the problem.
Thanks!
Keep watching the videos, I've done a few other presence videos that don't require anything 😅
I came up with the name for this project 😁
Really? That's awesome!
@@EverythingSmartHome yep. I met the dev in another project and together we decided to fork and rename since the other person abandoned their project
I noticed there's checkboxes for DHT11 sensors and ambient light sensors. Have you tried double jobbing your ESPresence devices as temp/humidity sensors too?
I tired ESPrecense on 3 ESP32 in my house just before the end of the 2021. After trailing them out for a week or so I ended up disconnecting them as the performance was all over the place. Also, it was extremely tricky to single out my apple watch from all the beacons recognised. In terms of reaction the location would not update as quick as one would expect e.g. as soon as you walk into the room. I connected a PIR sensor on one of the ESP32 devices and it would still get a few good seconds before it would locate me in the room.
I had 2 devices on the ground floor and one on the second floor. You could see my location randomly jumping from ground to 2nd floor which is really disappointing. I understand when the location is jumping between two neighbouring rooms not two flights of stairs.
Yeah I did mention speed right at the start of the video. 😜
you probably need to place it in a way, that there is always at least one sensor in a line of sight, so at least one of the sensors is getting a clean low noise info about your location, and all the others would just help you understand where exactly near that sensor you are.
@@MrFateTube that’s where I was disappointed with the results. I was 1-2 meters from one of the ESPs in one room and I could see the presence jumping two floors 😳. How???
🤷🏻
Any good Ali/Amazon/eBay links for compatible BLE beacons/tiles that work with this?
I rather like the idea and implementation of ESPresence.