I love posts like this. Thanks for sharing.
Radio interference from wireless charging makes Espresence shit?
Edit: OK, I've parsed that title again and understand what was meant.
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.
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.
Is there any alternative to ESPresence I can add to existing ESPHome devices? Some solution building around private BLE (which I did set up, but I’m not using) and stuff? I have quite a few ESPHome based devices doing their work and not using Bluetooth around my home.
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
I don't have any experience with it but this might do something along those lines(?):
https://esphome.io/components/binary_sensor/ble_presence.html
Seems like you can just add it to one or more of your existing esphome devices.
That wouldn’t really work for treacking Apple devices since they randomize their MAC addresses. Which is why I’ve added them using private ble integration in HA. It is able to detect their presence (or lack of it) via my ESPHome devices which are set up as Bluetooth proxies. What I would like though is know which room are they in - I have an ESP32 device in pretty much every room, and I wish I could leverage them without adding dedicated ESPresence ones.
homeassistant
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io