I have a cat who likes to go out and then later come in again. We don’t have (and want) a cat door, so we open the door for him. But now with the dark days coming, you don’t see him that well, so he can be sitting at the door for quite some time before we let him in. This can be either the front or the back door.
I have a tractive gps tracker, but there is no integration in Homey and the wifi-energy saving zone is quite big. So not really possible to log it’s current position.
The tractive gps tracker also has WiFi and Bluetooth. I’m thinking of a small device which I can place at the front and back door. The device should scan for Bluetooth devices, once the device has (i.e.) >90% reach with the tracker, there should be a notification.
Does anyone know if such a device exists. It maybe other ideas to automate this?
It might work with ESPresence, which would cost about €5 to €10 for an ESP32 and although the project is targeted towards Home Assistant it uses basic MQTT, which Homey can handle with the MQTT Broker/Client apps.
We use a motion sensor near the front door to detect our cats, but that only works because we have a long driveway (so no motion from the street that gets detected) and we get the occasional false positive when a neighbourhood cat triggers it.
That could be a solution, although indeed I don’t have a long driveway, so it will detect more than just the cat. I could of course with some duct tape make the detection area very small.
Another way I’m thinking about is to put 2 wireless (doorbell) buttons. The button has to be big and light. But then I need to train the cat
Some ESP32’s come with battery holder and charging circuitry, but since this relies on BLE scanning, you won’t get a great battery life, perhaps a couple of days (depending on how large the batteries are).
)