[APP][Pro] Homey ESPresense room presense system

Hi there little update from my site.

I’ve been very ocupied with https://hdashboards.app
However picked-up a bit of development of this plugin today.
I’m working on a new drive that includes your device so you can get the room back!

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@Menno_van_Hout if you need someone to help you test, feel free to let me know

Thanks a lot, I’m just not having any time yet to work on this app.

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Hey

I’ve just installed ESPresence app for the homey pro. Thanks for creating the app.

I’ve got a couple of questions

  1. I’m not seeing the device name in the widget eg. Here . It just shows me the distance to the device.

Someone posted earlier in this thread that this is what they saw on the app. Has this been fixed ?

  1. Do you have any suggestions for debugging / testing flows? I know the MQTT is getting the ESPresence data but I’m not sure if the ESPresence app mapping is working . Or it could be that my flow is not buggy.
    I’m going to create a basic flow to change the colour of a light to see to confirm that ESP is working.

Do you have any other suggestions ?

Cheers

John

I have successfully tested ESP App working using a light.

I found out that I needed to use “known:” in my ID for the saved devices that I have created on the ESP device…

Any news about having the names of tracked items in the homey widget?

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FYI:
I have got some tailbaits ( ATOM TailBat - Battery Accessory for ATOM | m5stack-store ) which are battery packs for the atom lite. They take about 2 hours to charge . (I found nothing anywhere that says how long they take to charge)

This means that I can use atom lite plus tailbait at our mailbox and you use them to signal the homey that my kids have left the house. :slight_smile:

With a 190mAh capacity, how long can you make them last?

I sadly still didn’t have much time yet to work on ESPresense again. Hope fully soon…

Hi Robert,

How the batteries last is what I was wanting to test.

Unfortunately, I have found out that the ATOMs run at a different expected clock speed and this triggers the Tailbat to turn off after 30 mins.

I have got the ESPresence Code and have upped the clock speed and tested. So far I am not successful to get it to last more than 30 mins. I will keep at it and update here.

John

With WiFi and BT always on you can probably expect a power consumption of about 150 to 200mA, which means that your battery will drain in about an hour or so, and that’s in optimal conditions.

My guess is that the Tailbat might be turning itself off to protect the battery from completely discharging (which is a no-no for lithium-based energy storage).

Hi Robert.

Right. OK. That’s not going to work for my use case. I am going to investigate how to get power to my mailbox.

I’m trying to figure out how to use ESP to know when my kids have left the house. I thought that putting an ESP sensor in my mailbox will tell me they are out. Because if they come near any of the other sensors then they are inside the house.

John

And you can’t use those sensors to determine if they are outside the house (if they’re not within range of any of the sensors, they are outside)?

Hi

Thanks for the suggestion.

I’ll need to put sensors in all our rooms to aid that. :slight_smile:

John

I have a question. @robertklep

Is there a good time comparison in homey for variables?

Why would I get the sensor to update . “Last updated” variable and periodically compare to current time and then I would know that they are “out” of the house.

You probably have to do set up something with timers: for each person you’re trying to track, you start a timer for (say) one hour. When the person is marked as present again by ESPresense you restart the timer, and when the timer times out (meaning that the person hasn’t been marked present in the last hour) you mark them as being out.

The Chronograph app can provide such timers.

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So I’m guessing that means that there is no date time comparison .

Thanks I’ll give that a go

I have added the timers and they work a treat . Thanks

John

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As i can see from the comments here, most people looking for ESPresense have some kind of technical background. I will make the repository opensource this evening.

If people would like to contribute feel free, i’ll make sure to keep my eye on pull requests and testing.

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Here we go:

I was working on a beacon, so you can actually also track a single device. I want to create that you can add a device that has a capability of room, so you activly know in which room that device is right now, aswell as last updated etc. Should also fix your needs @John_Clegg

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Hi Menno

Thanks for sharing the code. I will definitely check it out. :slight_smile:

John