XTension 9.5.1 Beta 6 with ESPresence Support!

[Chad Gard]

For what it’s worth on receiver placement…. What I have found that works pretty well (in 2 dimensions) is avoiding interior walls.  I’ve simply tucked ESP32’s behind window trim.  That makes them reasonably far away from other receivers, so that you won’t be closest to the kitchen receiver even though you’re in the master bathroom, simply because the signal is going through the wall.  A little tweaking in the ESPresence settings for maximum distance to report and it works quite well.

I haven’t found as good a solution for the second floor or basement, though.  Because the signal goes through floors just fine, too.

In theory, because a beacon should be received by several sensors, it is capable of triangulating an exact position of something in three dimensions.  Somewhere along the line a couple of years ago, I saw a YouTube video where one of the ESPresense folks was doing just that - well, in two dimensions…. But showing the exact location of a tracker in his flat in <a major European city, but I forget which one>.  I never figured out how to do it.  I’m relatively sure he wasn’t using the “stock” espresense firmware.  And in a production system, you’d have to limit the date rate if you were tracking animate things that move themselves, or you’d have a TON of MQTT traffic…


-- 
Chad

-What's Cookin' at the Farm?  Recipes, menus, and more at http://twie.holeinthewoodsfarm.com

> On Jan 23, 2023, at 10:42 AM, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:
> 
> Thats good news!
> 
> And what you describe as a use for it is exactly what I want to use it for too. The hardest part is figuring out which of all the devices that show up are the ones I want to look at ;) I’ve got some ideas for having more useful info in the Device unit which shows the label like updating the last activity whenever it changes rooms rather than just when it turns on to off or vice versa, some small things like that but overall it’s working very well in testing here too. The location units are what you would use to know if one of the known devices was in a specific room. Though you could do it with scripting I might recommend creating a group with all the location units that might be in a room and setting it to be on when any of the location units are on, then you have a single gropu unit to query if there are any of the expected devices in the specific room.
> 
> I’m still not entirely sure about the placement of the receivers and such, for example I want one of them in the wiring panel i’ve got in the kitchen pantry but thats right on the wall of the master bedroom where I could also use one so am not sure about that. Not having the lights turn out when my wife is taking an extended length bath will go a long way for Spousal Approval. I think I have the timeout in there set to half an hour, but she can definitely overstay that while in the tub reading ;) So I’ve got some work and experimenting to do but overall this is quite fun stuff!
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 23, 2023, at 7:27 AM, chad at holeinthewoodsfarm.com <mailto:chad at holeinthewoodsfarm.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Ok, I finally got a chance to mess with the new beta. Tight schedule for the next bit…
>> 
>> But I did want to report that the espresence support seems to be working well so far.  The label seems a good place for storing the location.  I’m nit automating based on it at tge moment, but it helped find my wife’s keys this morning.
>> 
>> One of the things I’ve had planned for a while but not implemented (in part because before I was making a detour through hone assistant um to use espresence) is sensing human room presence (or lack thereof) to turn off lights.  Because our dogs are as large as people, they trigger motion sensors.  Meanwhile, people don’t trigger motion sensors when reading, sleeping, etc.  
>> 
>> So, when a light gets turned on (or a security alarm triggered) by a motion sensor, when does it get turned off (or should the alarm sound?).  It depends - if a dog is what triggered it, turn off the light.  If a person, leave it on.
>> 
>> Ideally, we’d only turn the light/alarm on for humans.  But espresence doesn’t quite respond fast enough that when you walk into a room the light will be on before you need it to be (it can be up to a 5 second delay).  But, it’s plenty fast to know if you need to wait for << a couple iterations of the motion sensor’s timeout >> before declaring the room empty and turning out the lights, or just one.  Those with more money and less self consciousness might be able to use security cameras with ai human detection (built in or something like blue iris, doods, or frigate) to accomplish the same thing.  But this is my plan…
>> 
>> Anyway, I haven’t attempted to implement that, because the battery in the dog’s beacon died (and only one dog has one).  Will need to get to cvs for a battery, and pick up another waterproof beacon before trying it.
> 
> Thanks,
>  James
> 
> 
> James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org <http://www.planetarygear.org/>		http://MacHomeAutomation.com <http://machomeautomation.com/>
> 
> 
> 
> 
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