Rather than buying mmWave sensors, I've found it's a lot more cost-effective and flexible simply to add RFID tags to my family and guests. It's a quick setup process with implant tools which are available from any veterinary supplier (given convincing paperwork). And you don't even have to worry about explaining it to them, with the right combination of anaesthetics administered in a meal or drink.

I really like the thought process you have for home automation overall. Also your editing and B roll is really slick!

Another great video mate! You have a great channel!

Sick video man! Keep it up!

Glad I came across your channel. My NUC arrived on sunday and I'm going to be installing HA this afternoon.

I've found that IP cameras with facial recognition is great for presence detection. You don't even need to store the video, it can be deleted as soon as the OCR algo is done with it. Objects in view of 2 different cameras can even be located in 3 dimensions fairly accurately.

I think it makes sense to use both espresence with mmwave. I have an EP1 and I can use it as a ble tracker as well. The problem I have with ble tracking is that it's too slow to rely on alone for things you want to happen immediately as you enter or exit a room.

Great video man.. informative, no filler and even some production value. These things look sweet

When I was looking for what MM Wave device to use, I found one that actually is made to see your heartbeat.

Any idea how to overwrite it with esphome? I have the wroom-32, I tried overwriting from HA but it says 'Wrong boot mode detected (0xb)! The chip needs to be in download mode.' even though I held down the boot button during the connection.

Some great ideas in this video. I like the idea of only using the speaker in the room where the person is. I'm working on adding a bunch of ESPHome devices around the house. I'm adding a mmWave device, an I2S speaker, and hopefully an I2S microphone in each project box with an ESP32 S3. I'm having an issue with the microphone, but have a different one on order to try, the same one that is in the Atom Echo smart speaker. Probably some combination of mmWave and ESPresence will do fairly well. I already have my first speaker letting me know when someone is out front, saying things like "There is a truck and two people in the driveway", based on my security cameras and Blue Iris. I'll check out your Node Red code, I am always in search of new ideas and to learn more! Oh, and making my own ESPHome devices, and buying just the mmWave chips, I can get all that for pretty cheap. I do have one Aqara FP2 I am playing with though.

ESPresence relies on everyone carrying a Bluetooth device. In our case, that only applies to me. And not always. My wife often leaves her cell phone somewhere. The only advantage is that it's easier for her to find.

These two solutions are apples and oranges ... related but not used for the same use cases. You want mmwave to turn on lights as anyone enters the garage and espresence to tell you you wife is in the garage 😊

I liked this video. I will probably experiment with this in the future. MMwave is working well for me, but this could be nice for some automations such as validating when someone has arrived home via the garage. Subscribed!!! Thanks for such an informative video.

I was thinking of getting an aqara fp2 since it might double as an bed occupancy sensor. But after seeing your video I might reconsider. It would be great to have music start playing for a specific person. Or turning on a specific pc depending who is entering the room. Maybe I should get both 😅

I am using espresense as well. I couple it with motion sensors. that way motion can tell SOMEONE is in the room, turn on lights, ect. but then espresense is used to indicate who is in the room and if they are still in the room (sitting still, fell asleep ect) and can keep the lights on.

I love the intro! It needs a bit more touch and it could be used as an official "trailer" for ESP Presence :)

nice video! new sub

If you could add a mmwave sensor to the espsense you would have the best of both worlds, even better is you could improve the reliability of the espsense if the radio was only active in populated rooms which it would be able to differentiate with a mmwave sensor.

Hi One off topic question, how do you configure your google home device to play personalised news, calendar events or songs via home assistant (or whatever the way you are doing it)

So only did a brief look at espresence, it seems like what i'm seeing is that in order for it to work on android phones you might need to install an app, and under a lot of the watches, it seems like they don't work if they're paired with a phone? If true, that seems like a limited use since very few people wouldn't have their watched paired to something? That said, I haven't watched your original video so i'll go watch that now.

I wonder if I can use shelly devices for this purpose? They got bluetooth in their gen2 and I got these already scattered around the house

There’s one last difference!! Money!! In a three room house I used pir + mmvawe. But in my family house, I couldn’t buy so many expansive sensors for multiples rooms (or multiple sensors for large rooms). So in this house I used the good old esp32 for 7€ for room!! (I’ve bought packs of 5 esp32, each pack 35€!) Both systems work pretty well!! Great video! Thanks!!

I'm hoping that someone builds a homeassistant-native replacement that uses ble_proxy via esphome, that way we have the flexibility of running multiple things on the esp32's (or at least not dedicating them to esprescense), and we can centralise the collation of rssi's at the homeassistant level. That way I think it *should* be possible to include some basic (or advanced) triangulation, and potentially using mapping and fixed beacons to intelligently adjust rssi's against expected and measured propagation. Potentially one could map a whole house with only three proxies (but I wouldn't expect great results) and additional proxies would add to the potential resolution. If it works ok one could then potentially calculate realtime vectors for tracked beacons, enabling some rough predictions of anticipated area entry. Currently it looks like the ble component in HA keeps the rssi about each advertisement received by each proxy, but a component might need to poll the internal structure each loop as it doesn't look like it fires events as frequently as we'd probably need (pulling the debug info on the bluetooth component shows the data). Let me know when you raise a PR 😅

I would need a map card with a "Marauders Map" that showed names and footprints as we moved around the house. JK can get bent, but I'll use the idea.

For me, the biggest downside of ESPresence it, that i can't use it with ESPHome. I have BUNCH of ESP32 around the house already, with BLE stack unused. Putting ESPResence-flashed chips alongside seems like overkill. Ah, and setup/adjustment is pretty inconvenient. I'm using my own solution to this, as extension aka custom_component for ESPHome.

this is in no way better that MMWave when i constantly have to have a mobile or a Bluetooth enabled unit on me all the time.

Hi, very good start to ESP presence detection. I'm just going to say something... I really, really like your intros. I had to see if a couple of times. Looking forward to your other videos. BTW, I know you do everything in node-red, but I'm trying to do what you're doing "natively" in HA. Maybe I'll publish the automations and scripts.

It is a nice technology. But what if you forget your phone in the living room and you dont have your watch on your wrist and then go to the attick for which the lights are controlled by espresence.... it will stay dark. Presence detection based on a device being present on a person only is not a good solution as it is actually device detection. Now, mmwave combined with esppresence, that has added value: mmwave tells you someone is in. In addition: esppresence may provide you info on who is in the room and trigger scenes or settings based on that for that specific person or persons

What we need is someway of fusing all the sensors together! What i'm thinking of is something that keeps track of all activity in an area and attempts to label it "Anonymous" or the name of the person. Use the icloud gps locations of a person when out of the home, and the espresense companion gps locations when in the home. Have some amount of filtering based on impossible combinations. I've had HA assume i've driving 200mi in a second and then 200mi away a second later. Obviously that data should be thrown away.

¿por qué no los dos?

This is a good solution since I have a nano pc inserted into my body already.

awesome intro

I tried ESPresence but the only Bluetooth devices carried by people in my house are Android phones. I tried for several days to get ESPresence to receive Bluetooth signals from Android but it just doesn't work. Android uses nonstandard Bluetooth packets that ESPresence doesn't know how to read.

A solution, albeit expensive, might be to have mmWave in each room and have the mmWave trigger an update to ESP Presence.

I don't really see it as mmwave vs bluetooth or other IPS. It kinda surprises me that someone would make the comparison as either/or. This is kinda like saying you don't need to see someone, because you can smell them instead. And though that may be true, it makes for awkard and probably inaccurate identification of your loved ones. I think apple devices obfuscate their id somehow too, so unless you install an app on an iphone, I don't think it's possible to detect where in a building they are using bluetooth. Motion detection is A mode of presence detection, but it shouldn't be the complete solution. You can use mmwave to detect if there is motion (that isn't to say there is a person in the room, a cat or falling object would trigger it just as easily,) and then fine-tune the information using bluetooth. I wouldn't want to wait until identifying WHO is in the room before I determine whether to turn lights on for example. So, you can save time and instantly turn on lights because no matter who it is, you probably don't want them stumbling around in the dark. MMwave can tell you if there's motion, but it can't distinguish on its own whether that's a person or a fan for example (there may be processors/boards with some logic built in, I'm referring only to the sensor itself.) So it's pretty much mandatory to use other forms of detection. Detecting whether or not your phone is moving, or if your watch is on a wrist can be useful for determining whether or not to register coming and going, and if mmwave is not registering motion but your phone is there not moving, it's safe to assume you're either not on the planet, or otherwise not in the room. It doesn't help if your roommate is in the room and you've left without your phone, but it does help with most other cases. You could always detect who in particular is talking when using speech to text too; I've seen a few different models that can help with this, I've got it on my docket of things to try out. But I'd love to see you do a video on it if you try it out.

I’m sincerely curious if y’all really have it working? I put an ESPresence sensor in every room, tuned the minimum distance, etc. and it’s wildly inaccurate and buggy. I’ll be 1M from a sensor and HA thinks I’m on another floor across the house.

Do you know of any good mmWave sensors?

lol is ESPresense not presence