Yeah WOL was one of the first things I looked for in HA because I just didn’t have all that much in the way of Smart stuff.

Anyway nowadays I have an automation you may like. I have set up a little wireless dock for my phone on my desk. It’s the only wireless charger I use, so using the Companion app sensors (namely the charger type) I have set up an automation that turns on my PC when I dock my phone.

Meaning I literally flop down on my chair and put my phone on the charging stand and the PC turns on.

Now when that PC is picked up on the network HA will turn on my monitor (via a smart plug) and my desk lamp.

I also have a program on the PC that detects what I’m doing, and can switch the PC off!

So I can add switching the PC off to my automations, like my Goodnight automation

That was the idea! I came across it looking for something else. I’ve been using a blueprint for a while (since you haven’t even looked yet) that will pull when the alarm is sounding and snoozed and such.

I have moved back to Node Red and made it myself there now though. What I use it for is I set the alarm to ramp up volume after 3 minutes, but the alarm also triggers my lights turning on.

Since the lights usually wake me up I usually have a silent alarm clock, meaning I don’t wake The Wife at 5am when I get up for work.

My son heard about it so now he also wakes up to the lights coming on.

You can use that to start your morning automations if you’re so inclined, so when your alarm goes off and the Kitchen motion sensor is triggered for your morning cup of Joe, you can fire your morning reminders and traffic info

Yeah I’ve kinda found the sweet spot now to be fair, but I’m using an esp32 board and some dude’s yaml, so I’ve been groping in the dark a bit

I already have motion sensors everywhere but I also have cats. They make it seem like there’s people wandering around the house all the time.

I’ve placed a lot of them on top of door frames that seem to miss the cats, but in the front room there’s sofas for them to climb up on which means they still get picked up.

I have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they’re worse for picking up the cats.

So what I’m trying to do is add more sensors so HA has a better picture of who is in the house, and when.

To give you an idea, yesterday I took my wife to a Dr appointment, my kids are at their grandparents, but when I was sat on the car waiting for Wifey I noticed my kitchen lights were on in the app.

The Drs turned into the hospital and I was out for a good 4 hours, but got home and added “Is anyone home?” to my lights automations.

The cats don’t need lights

Anyone wondering about tuning:

Absorption is the amount of “stuff” between 2 base stations. Increasing the value seems to “attract” Bluetooth to it.

So if you’re sat next to a station and it’s saying you’re nearer another, increasing absorption seems to help with that.

I believe the other comment is correct, there’s 2 ways of adding Bluetooth presence, one is espresence which I’m using and the other is a less feature filled version in esphome.

I have done a lot of moving my esp boards around though to improve it. They seem to work better when they’re in different locations.

So for example I had one at the top of my stairs but I’ve moved it across the room, further away from the one on the floor below which was at the bottom of the same stairs. I also moved that one into a room and higher up because it was interfering with the one on the floor below that.

And that one I moved to the other side of the room, and the one on my ground floor has been dropped to floor level instead of sitting at waist height.

Point being, if you’re putting it onto already placed sensors, ymmv

Yup exactly that.

I only figured it out after fine tuning for hours to try and stop it. But the fine tuning I did while I was getting interference has actually made espresence better.

It was bouncing around stations a lot, but by turning the absorbsion up on the station in my front room it’s sorted all that out and now it’s accurate.

The point I think is that while most locks are really easy to pick relatively, the people that it’s really easy to pick to, aren’t the same people robbing your house.

The ones that sit and practice picking the locks are the ones that install them, or come out when you’ve misplaced your keys and get you in the house.

The robbers are mainly opportunists that wander around looking for open doors and windows, knock to see if you’re home then try to force a way in.

Let’s not mention the nose and ear hairs that grow 3 times faster, or the greys that multiply

Haha it’s my shoulders and neck that lets me know.

Meh I’m still 25 in my head…

The ld1115h. Best thing is it’s much better than the aqaras and cost about 2/3 the price. It was free shipping over £8 so that’s around what it cost to make.

Just hooked my HA into Google Assistant so it can see my devices with this https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/ then made a Google automation to match the words to turning the plug on.

Don’t know why you’ve been down voted but don’t worry I put you back up to positive.

Your toaster automation sounds like what I had to do with the old dishwasher. It would finish the cycle but not stop, so it would continually try to keep up to temperature for some reason.

So I had my notify automation for when it was done and then I had it switch off when the power dropped.

Minor inconvenience to that setup was having to turn it back on again when I wanted to use it. I didn’t wanna have to go under the sink and wade through all the shit in there to get to the plug so I used Google “Hey Google, wash up”

But we have a new one now so I can leave it on.

I also have the washing machine notification. At present it announces when the motion sensor in the kitchen picks up movement and the washer is finished, and sends a notification to the phones in the house when the announcement is made with “I emptied it” and “Ignore” so you walk in the kitchen, get shouted at to empty the washer and a phone notification.

But I am planning on having the same presence detection pick up who triggered the motion sensor and only notify that phone, just haven’t gotten around to it just yet

how do you know when to send the notification btw? Did you configure some automation or script that just says how long until notify?

When power drops below a certain wattage I figure the cooking it complete. I’ve set it to 20 because it seems my air fryer drops to 24W every few minutes (when it’s reached temp I guess) and my rice cooker drops below 50W when it’s on the Keep Warm cycle.

So above 50W it checks the room and below 20W it calls a notification from the people that were in the room.

Also, as a minor annoyance, I could only flash the board from chrome when connected to a WINDOWS machine which I find pretty nasty 🤢, but I may be in the minority there.

Yeah I was a Linux-boy for a decade before a friend gave me a gaming PC he made out of spare parts for me. His one stipulation was NO LINUX so I’m stuck with Windows. But I get ya.

Just coming back in to say that yeah, now I’ve used it as a primary trigger instead of a secondary check it seems I’m all over the place in Bluetooth land…

I don’t have a motion sensor in my bedroom. I do have an old phone on a charging stand that I use as a Smart Clock, and the camera of that can be used as a motion sensor. It’s pointed at my head when I’m in bed so it’s not in an optimal motion sensor position… Just setting the scene for you.

Now I had an automation that turns bedroom lights on based on motion so when I wake up in the middle of the night for a pee I have a lamp that turns on for five minutes.

Well of course I wanted MORE from this extra from my clock, so I’ve added presence in the room as a primary trigger of my lamps.

I’m stood in my room watching my lights popping on and off again every 30 seconds…

Not great as a primary trigger, more a secondary check.

Anyway I’m gonna try and change it by adding “in room FOR 30 seconds” to my sensors, seems to be helping so far.

Also limiting reporting distance in the settings for each node to 4-6 meters.

Or maybe stop trying to use it as a primary sensor lol

Yeah you certainly need more than one sensor. I have one per floor

Yeah I have a million Bluetooth devices picked up but I’ve only put 4 of them so far into my Ha sensors. Fuck knows what the others are, but we have soany devices in the house that I can’t keep track, then there’s the neighbours’ stuff too…

Interestingly I stumbled across a YouTube short yesterday about hacking an android device from only knowing it’s Bluetooth Mac address, so theoretically I could really piss off my neighbours if they drove me to it.

The secret is not caring it’s 4m away as long as it says you’re closest to that one. It’s not accurate, it’s a guess made with software.

As I’ve said I’ve sat at my PC on the front room and watched it say I’m in my bedroom and kitchen.

So for example my front room lights are based around an input boolean. They’re triggered on by motion but back off by whether the TV is on, my wife’s laptop is connected to the WiFi, the pc is switched off, and everyone’s presence is not in the front room. I already did all that and now I have presence as well.

It used to be that my wife would be sat there on her phone and the lights would go out, now because her phone is on her person they stay on.

Like I say, they’re not perfect but they are better than not having them.

I don’t think I’ll ever have my music follow me around the house.

Oh also try instead of basing automations around whether you are in a room, instead use “is not”

So for example when I get out of bed and get up for work by bedroom lights come on with my alarm. When I go downstairs and make a brew I am no longer in the bedroom so my automations turn off the lights in there. Is not “bedroom”

It’s triggered by the motion sensor outside my bedroom door, then it waits for my presence to be anything other than bedroom. Since I’m moving around the house it’ll trigger at some point.

Similarly my sleep automation turns off when the bedroom is no longer occupied. But that’s when my wife gets up 2 hours after me. It’s also triggered by motion, but then waits until my bedroom presence sensor no longer reads anything

You pair the device to a base station once to create an entity but you don’t have to if you know the mac of your phone. So there’s no pairing involved in the tracking.

You can use the HA app to create a beacon on your phone when you’re on your home WiFi and not pair anything, just plumb the id into HA.

The speed is quite fast but there is still a lot of false positives. I’ve sat and watched mine and my wife’s phones just pinging around the house, but if you add some “for X seconds” to your automations it becomes much more stable.

I’ve got 3 android phones and an iPhone tracked at present