Who gives a fuck what an old dead lizard thought?
Now you've got me wondering what marshal art Armish Ninjas would learn.
Like where I'm from in Yorkshire the marshal art is Ekky Thump, and in Scotland they learn Fah Kyoo...
Kung Plow?
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
Wouldn't even have to be ninjas tbh, but yeah fuck it, ninjas!
Meh, disagree.
Yup espresence
Espresence, it tracks Bluetooth and guesses which node it's closest to, it's guesses are really good
A month later and I have to say my automations are so much cleaner!
I started using HA's automation engine just to have a go. I bought some ESP32 sensors and set up ESPresence and thought it was time to reinstall Node Red.
What I've done is just made a presence page for all the complicated logic, then separate pages for rooms and automations.
So my Front room gets quite complicated so it has it's own page but hallways just require motion sensing and maybe illuminance, so there's just a Hallways page.
I've also discovered how to make Binary Sensors in Node Red so I've less need for all the Input Booleans I once used.
I'm a week in to having an espresence node on each of my 4 floors and it's just really useful. Motion sensor stopped tracking motion? Well is someone still on that floor? Yeah? Don't turn the lights off then...
I'm currently moving my HA automations back in to node red and there's some bugs when I forget to turn off the HA counterpart, but that will go as I clear out the automations.
It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.
To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.
And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.
But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.
So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.
I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren't all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.
Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don't do advertising. Pisses me off.
So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I'm curating a music collection I've pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it's feasible to replace Spotify but I can try
Congratulations!
That Baby will want some Peppa Pig (mine are over a decade old now so yes I'm out of date) in the future so your stack will come in useful again!
My Babies want Anime now
What was that noise from upstairs? Probably a murderer!
Is the noise it would make
Cool, I'll keep tinkering and let you know when I reinvent quantum computing