The BEST Smart Home Room Presence Detection I've Tried!

I recently heard about a new project ESPresense: a Bluetooth tracker running on relatively cheap ESP32’s that will give you room presence as you move around your smart home. In this video, I show you how it works, how to easily set it up and how to integrate it into Home Assistant for whole house room tracking for use within Home Assistant Automations!
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ESPresense Install page:
espresense.com/install
ESPresense GitHub:
github.com/ESPresense/ESPresense
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[@paininthenic]

THANK YOU! I've been waiting for something like this for a while!! More on this topic is always welcome.

[@markvk42]

Ive just found your channel, because im thinking of moving away from Hubitat to HA. I watched this and my jaw dropped... Individual room presence!! tied in with motion sensors, finally sorts out the pet issues with turning on lights! IF I CAN GET IT TO WORK! awesome work, thanks.

[@rockettpc2]

Really cool, I would love to see this on the interactive floorplan, position tracking, for a warehouse cause use. Track the movement of equipment and pallets or carts, etc.

[@sedativejam]

Haha... You said equipment, I read staff... :P

[@HowardPrice]

Awesome video! I’ve played around with things like Room Assistant before, never with much success. I’d love to see another video on the applications of this tech. Always looking out for ideas. Now I need to go watch your videos on general presence detection as I’ve had little success with that either, after having spent weeks trying to get the Monitor project to work for me.

[@kevinreedmiller]

Thank you so much for this. I have a box of ESP32s waiting for a project and this is it! A follow up on suggestions re automations would be much appreciated. Keep up the good work. Thanks again.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thank you man, have fun!

[@TifonEral]

Set up my whole house (5 sensors, 2 waiting) in less than 2 hours, thanks for the video!!!!!

[@markkulepisto1159]

Your production quality and content are excellent! congrats and thank you!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks so much, really appreciate that! Its something I take a lot of pride in and always trying to improve!

[@danhansendk]

Nice... Will be coming back to this video and make use of it when I am getting around to setting up my home with smart home devices. Only just begun.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Let me know how it goes!

[@buddychamberlin8616]

Thanks so much for this very helpful and well thought out guide Lewis! Just used it to setup some D1 minis I got to use as room presence trackers. Appreciate you!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Appreciate you for watching buddy!

[@tomgrounds]

This is an amazing video and concept! I'm a bit late to the game here with Home Assistant and ERPresence. I just finished installing 17 ESPresence devices around our home and they work so well! You may also want to do an update to this video as they have added the ability to 'enroll' devices with the EsPresence itself (especially Apple Devices) - it makes it so much easier to manage! Thanks for the great videos and ideas - I'm now a faithful subscriber and member and look forward to what you have in store for your followers! I wish you continued success.

[@riaanpretorius8184]

Glad to see you also gave it a go.. Did this a couple of weeks back. Works well!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Glad you've already tried it Riaan and working well for you!

[@Waterbottle365]

This is sick! Looks like I found a new project. Thanks for the video!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks for watching!

[@MarkGhali]

Lewis awesome video! I have been loving espresense! I would love a follow-up video on automations!! I have had this setup for awhile but not done any automations for it yet.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

That's good to know, how are you finding ESPresense so far?

[@michaelmanry588]

Another great Home Assistant video! I would also love a follow-on video (as I suspect everyone does). I did wonder if ESPresense can triangulate, since I can't exactly put the ESP32 in the center of the room.

[@romaomiguel]

Hi, This is a really cool project and I've already buy some ESP32 to start with it. It would be great if 1. this is merged with ESPHOME 2. you could make a video on conditional automations to get this working 3. any blueprint to HA would be also great

[@barefooter2222]

Loving this so much better than Room Assistant! I am using this to track my dog with a Tile Tracker and so far it is working great. One thing that would be super helpful to add to this would be to map this to a device tracker so that you can actually tie this to a user for home/away state.

[@daveacorn782]

Great video! Love to see a followup on this one! Thanks in advance!

[@17Oli]

Im loving this project! I definitely would love to see a follow-up video on this.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

What would you like to see?

[@17Oli]

I think some creative automations using this should be pretty useful. Like a top x automations video :)

[@davesadler624]

@@EverythingSmartHome I would love to see using presence to direct a TTS notification to the nearest Echo/Google Assistant/Sonos speaker

[@turnkit]

@@EverythingSmartHome map overlay Have wanted a campus or business building map dashboard for a secretary for a long time: one look and they could see where in the building anyone is - out one at the exit and you can see what time they left. It’s all about good data and good UI.

[@jorgeelima]

@@EverythingSmartHome how do you capture the iPhone?

[@user-jm8ho2hy8g]

I would love to to see ESPhome having this built in! I am going to do this for opening my garage when I start my motorcycle or ride home

[@GagliardiPhotography]

I'd like to see some practical examples about this project! Great video, as usual!

[@albertroswell]

well explained for advanced users I like that, subscribed

[@FloWmo619]

Nice. Thanks for making this video, I was really hoping for one on presence detection!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@FloWmo619]

@@EverythingSmartHome And of course I would very much enjoy a follow up video to this one.

[@rrlevy]

Amazing project! Please do more videos on applications

[@SlackerLabs]

Yes! This is the video I have been waiting for! So good.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks Jeff! Have you tried this out yet?

[@SlackerLabs]

@@EverythingSmartHome I have not tried it yet. But I did grab some esp32s a while back so I could. Going to work on it this week

[@SignedForFun]

Nice to see two of my favorite youtubers chatting with each other. Learned a lot from you guys. Keep up the nice work. Excellent video Lewis.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks man! Appreciate it!

[@AlfredoMannina]

Fantastic Job, it works very well for me, thanks

[@peterwronski595]

It would be great to see some NodeRed automation samples with this presence detection. Thankyou for this video - seems so simple. I think I will try it in rooms that have limited movement, such as living room (whilst watching TV) etc.

[@patrickpaganini]

Yes I've been looking for that too. It might be worth trying HA in conjunction with node-red since it seems to have more support for this kind of thing at the moment.

[@christopherellis2273]

This is exactly the video I was looking for after your Q&A video talking about your lights coming on automatically. I really wish this was integrated into ESPHome too because it would be nice to wire a cheap PIR sensor into the ESP32s as well to trigger the lights to come on with the sensor and keep them on with ESPresence.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Yeah I agree it seems they are trying to incorporate sensors into ESPresense which I can would be beneficial but seems like reinventing the wheel - that's why ESPHome would be great with this

[@Dennis-qm4rd]

@@EverythingSmartHome Any idea if they plan to integratie within ESP Home? This would mean much more enthusiastic users I guess...

[@surfingnoid]

Well done, and thanks for this!

[@Asgard2693]

I see home assistant video I click! Cheers for the content

[@EverythingSmartHome]

A man of culture

[@PatrickBulteel]

Sweet! This is great - exactly what I was looking for. I was looking at Room Assistant since I have some RPis sitting around. Some of which I'm thinking of making into media players (plug a speaker and run vlc)

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Good luck with it!

[@SignedForFun]

Thanks a lot Lewis for the video. I would love to see a follow up video on how to use this in automations. Here is what i want to use it for. I have a 5 months old baby often sleeping in baby stroller. and we will take him to different rooms for sleep. Now, i have a input boolean (baby sleeping) and input select where the values are the rooms that the baby is sleeping. Then my announce script via alexa will not play notification in the room that the baby is currently sleeping. So, currently i have to select every time where the baby stroller is, which is annoying and we sometimes forget to do that. I was thinking to hook up a bluetooth to the stoller (like a watch) and use ESPresense to change the value of the input select automatically. Should work.

[@M1L31]

excellent video! saved a lot of time for me

[@smoger_moore8601]

Thanks for the very clear instruction, just got them up and running! 1 thing I noticed is that my ESP32's are rebooting quite often with ESPresense running on it. In the beginning every 15-20 seconds (Debug exception reason: Stack canary watchpoint triggered (BLE Scan)). After turning off the option 'Query devices for characteristics' this bug was gone, but they still reboot quite often (longest run so far is 30 minutes). Will see whether I can find the root cause.

[@jamese.fabbrini-gs7ov]

Great video. Thanks

[@martynpriest7118]

Good video. I have been using ESPresense for a few months now and I found it more user friendly than Room Assistant that I could not get to work for the life of me. I still need a few more ESP32'S for full coverage. I only have the one automation using this and that is to determine which room I am working in so when a call is received/made the music on my echo device stops and starts again when it ends. I also intend to add a PIR to each so as to reduce the number of devices in each room. Hoping that there may be support for bme280's in the future rather than just for dht11 (maybe 22's).

[@SMGGM]

I never thought my fitbit would help me to be too lazy to turn off devices when I leave the room. Anyways, great video and amazing idea. Cheap enough to simply try it out and see how it works.

[@dretwav]

Thanks for a great video. I had lots of trouble finding an app that would identity the id of my Apple Watch. There is an easy workaround though. Open MQTT Explorer and you can see all the messages the espresense is sending. The other advantage is that I realized the "tile" devices I keep in my wallet and on my keyring could be used as well as my watch so I could actually set up sensors for those and figure out which in which room I misplaced my wallet.

[@My427Cobra]

Great video. When will you be posting the follow up on how you use ESPresense in your implementation?

[@IsmailIqbaldcf]

Nice video. Definitely would love a follow up. Also curious on how to automate a bathroom light and also would love to hear on how you did the presence sensor automation for each room with the PIR sensor I'm unable to do it. Are you placing the Sensor under the door header is it

[@dharmilr]

Amazing ! Just what I needed ! Thanks a ton

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Glad it helped!

[@dharmilr]

@@EverythingSmartHome first of all . thank you once again coz it will make my life much easier. so I got things working and I set up my iPhone X with it. after I leave the room and once the connection is lost , it doesn't connect to the phones bluetooth again when I re enter the room , only when I restart the device or reset the bluetooth on my iPhone , the connection is re-established . Also I tried to set up my wife's phone as well ( same model- IphoneX ) but the device ID is exactly the same and now the esp senses both our distances and cannot differentiate . HELP!!

[@bananomgd]

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! I want this to turn off the lights if nobody is in a room for more than 10 minutes.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Good luck!

[@rob1971]

Another great video Lewis, clear and easy to understand as always 🙂 Tempted to order a 3-pack of ESP32s and give this a go... I'll just need to remember to always have a suitable Bluetooth device on me then 😉

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Definitely worth a go 😅

[@AngloYorkshire]

Please do some automations using this like turning off the lights when you leave the room. Will be most helpful. Thanks

[@kreene1987]

Interesting. The perk of room-assistant is the auto-detection (phone doesn't have to be "on", etc.). I've had really good luck with it so far, but always willing to give something "new" a try!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Be interested to hear your results;

[@Naesstrom]

Oh that's awsome, I already have a bunch of D1 minis running DHT22 and PIR sensors but I see at 5:14 in the video that ESPresense supports it natively to. Will be ordering a bunch of ESP32's to upgrade the current nodes to use this instead!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

I'd maybe be cautious around that, not sure how well it works!

[@boehserenkel]

Thanks for this video. Could you do a comparison with room assistant for example?

[@MzumOritz]

Hi! Thanks for your video. Have you explained how to set up your motion light automations in one of your videos yet? Yours appear to be very on point for both directions, while my setup (ikea motion sensor) has an updating cycle of about 3 minutes and is not very reliable. Thanks!

[@oknfls]

One of your best videos. Thanks. You should definitely make a follow up video and talk a little more about IPhones and IOS devices.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks!

[@tsgeekk]

Lewis this is fantastic! I've been trying various methods for room presence for years now, and they have all failed. This appears more reliable. Can't wait to give it a try. My esp32 boards just arrived. BTW, there is a link to a written article in the description, but I can't find the write up on your website. Is that coming? Thanks again!

[@DigitalArchmage]

interesting. this reminds me that how i found your channel was when I looked for room occupancy detection and found the bed project.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Allll the way back when

[@mindracing]

Another really useful video. I am testing two nodes at present. iPhone 12 is working well and pretty solid whereas  Watch drops out periodically, even though I'm just 1m from the node. Response is not really fast enough to use for lighting automation though and I'm not sure what else I could is for. All the same, it's a nice idea and well implemented. If I move to using this on a permanent basis I'll probably go with the ESP32 D1 mini due to the more compact form factor.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Yes I mentioned right at the beginning not to rely on this for turning lights on etc 😅 are you sure your picking up the right beacon?

[@florent6382]

Yes, that works ! :) OK, got into some trouble finding the bluetooth mac addresses of my iOS devices as I don't have an Androïd phone (hmmm actually I have, well my wife has. Well she wasn't home at thet moment). So I used Acrylic BLE Analyzer (5 days trial). Now I'm onto trying to make something in Nodered.

[@jameswong3674]

Thank you for a great video! This works great if you have one floor, but if you have multiple floors, then the trackers flick back and forth, for example from garage to 4th bedroom, because the 4th bedroom is above the garage. Is there a way to distinguish it base on altitude?

[@victorjappe]

Great system and explanation. The only downside by implementing it to smartswitches, would be when switches often are mounted close to the door of a room and therefore would report closest if you only walk past a room? Or atleast thats just a theory.

[@pokeysplace]

This looks to be a much cleaner solution to what I but together last year with ESPHome's ble_rssi platform and a bunch of Node Red flows to compare the signal levels.

[@antonburdin9756]

Hi, Thank you for the video. Could you please show us how this software could run on existing ESP 32 devices? Will it interfere with their normal operation? Could we use ESP 32 lighting fixtures (like Yeelight, it is always powered thanks to FlexSwitch), to run such software?

[@_Talik]

this seems like a good idea

[@RaffBuilding]

I have a detached workshop and have been considering a BT presence to trigger a smartlock as I approach. Since HA isn't 100% reliable, I'm reluctant in investing in a smartlock. I might try the project, just triggering some notification before I actually purchase the lock. BTW, great video.

[@davidevans5670]

Got this set up and really really happy! Just a query - the final room I'm in is the final state reported to the sensor. Is there a way to default back to an "away" setting for when you actually leave the house? If you go into the back yard etc?

[@MichaelAlderete]

Seems like a really promising solution to fine-grained presence detection! Very interested in seeing what these look like when put into a case and connected to power. All too often these things are ugly, ugly, ugly, and I’m not plugging ~10 ugly devices in every room of the house. Forget “spouse approval factor” - *I* don’t want to see them all over the place. It’s fun to geek out and play with toys on a workbench, but for permanent install, aesthetics matter.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Agreed!

[@MiketenWolde]

Thank you for all the good content! There is now an HA integration, which makes it possible to do bluetooth proxy device tracking in combination with ESPhome. It is called ‘Bermude BLE’. Would you be so kind to make a tutorial about it?

[@KenJones1961]

Definately doing this when it gets to Hubitat!

[@florent6382]

Now I have to say it but 1 minute into any of your videos I4m already trying to catch my breath. Breathe mate ! :)

[@Friedi]

Hi. Great video! At the moment I wonder whether this functionality is still working or better to say would it be able to use it with the new Bluetooth proxy component. do you have any experiences with that?

[@BBalasa]

Nicely presented , this is my default channel for HA. Thanks a ton , i am on it now….

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Too kind 🙏

[@SBinVancouver]

Yes please! I'd like to see examples of automations using this, with MQTT. Also, the espresence/install page is /firmware now.

[@bryceyorkpm]

Thank you!

[@MarcoGT]

Thanks, for this video, wonderful; but I think I missed the part where the binary sensor shall be put into the config

[@rabinshaltiel8950]

Thank you for the video Can you please try and explain why it can't find any network?

[@asopok]

I learnt the new HA bluetooth integration can track bluetooth bands. Can you make a video on how to set them up?

[@innesmclean]

This video has been fantastic for getting me up and running with ESPresense on esp32s. I followed your exact set up and all works great. Senors (base stations - 3 x ESP32s) working with MQTT and beacons (apple watches) each set up in the config.yaml per this video (but using irk's). However, I'm not clear though on how I create automations using these sensors - e.g. when my daughter leaves her room (her apple watch leaves) her light switches off. There is mention of the possibility of a follow up video on that...any news? thanks!!

[@davidjohnson2782]

I’d really like to see a follow up video showing how to automate in HA to turn lights on and off in conjunction with a motion detector please 🙏

[@erwinsanders407]

Great video The only part which I have problems is the detecting the android phone it looks that the get a new ID all the time

[@theAVZ]

Awesome video. Can you make a guide video with Raspberry pi zero w and room assistant.

[@junkins]

Thanks! Yes, follow up please. 😁

[@cosimopanoni5356]

Thank you for the great video! What is the state displayed when I am not home, so when the device is far from the esp32? I thought about using this with only 1 esp32 to track when I come back home and I am in front of the main door, but I would need a state change to trigger an automation. Any thoughts? Thank you in advance!

[@TheSlowestZombie]

I've tried this out and got 3 of the ESP32 WROOMs linked in the description. Two of them, after flashing them a second time (2.0.17) while troubleshooting wifi connections, no longer load. The third one was working and connected to mqtt for a few minutes, but while mapping out the bluetooth mac addresses it got stuck in a reboot loop. I want this to succeed very much, but it feels like it's just not quite there.

[@MikeDooley]

Would love to see a follow up on this!

[@EnricAragorn]

Wow, impressive!! BLE is a future solution!

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks!

[@joejoe6949]

Yes please a step by step set up Guide

[@rex8200]

I’m redoing my home theater and I think this would work perfectly for me. Is there a way to tell Alexa to shut off lights when they are no longer needed?

[@The_Mup]

I noticed there's checkboxes for DHT11 sensors and ambient light sensors. Have you tried double jobbing your ESPresence devices as temp/humidity sensors too?

[@xisop]

Edit: Got it working stable. going to flash all my ESP's with espresense, plan is to turn off the lights when all devices are "out of reach" #energychallange. Hope i can come up with the automations I'm going to give this a try. Got a bunch of 32's just laying around. Been tinkering with a project like this but the esp's keep going offline somewhere between 10 minutes and 24 hours.

[@PhilMandryk]

Would love to see a follow up video for this usage.

[@joejoe6949]

Can you make a port two video on how to Implement a light trigger automation

[@kbxbr]

I think ESPHome has a presence / RSSI signal / etc but i liked how ESPresense changes values of position for each device on HomeAssistant! Hope those projects merges because at esphome there's no need for MQTT configuration and we can use ESP32 chips for other functions at the same time

[@EverythingSmartHome]

It does but not as advanced as ESPresense like you say, would love to see them merged

[@GoodDeal123]

Absolutely agree. Great project and would love to try, but I won't for the moment as I my system works perfectly with many ESPHome devices over wifi. I would literally have to set up MQTT only for ESPresence. Very much hoping for the merge or a version that allows both mqqt and tcp.

[@AlexAlex-ng4vw]

This looks like a great future project that I would love to tackle. This may not be the initial use for it but I would love to put this in my parents house to use as a sort of "last known/current room location" for their phones and devices! My mom and sister are infamous for forgetting where they put their phones and devices and have used the find my device features a lot! I'm wondering if it would be possible to use these ESP32's to help narrow down which room they would be in.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Haha that's a great use case I never even considered!

[@tonyyeung821]

Thanks for this video. I was eager to try this out, since I wear my Fitbit Charge 4 all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with that device. The watch doesn't seem to regularly broadcast.

[@tonyyeung821]

After further testing, the watch stops broadcasting if the device it is paired with is nearby.

[@dretwav]

I am glad that this works for you. It seems very unreliable in my usage. I have it tracking my phone, my watch (both Apple) and two Tiles. Even though they are all on my person they show either different rooms or not_home. The phone seems the most consistent but I can have it in my pocket about two feet from the office ESP and over the course of an hour it will show not_home for 40% of the time. Are there any setting you changed other than the obvious maximum distance.

[@dgillings]

I have the very same problem. The polling of the distance seems VERY slow (running HA on a raspberry pi 4) I've added 4 devices (as I couldn't find the MAC of the apple devices - so just added them all with unique names to work out which was which) and the locations vary from 1-4 metres even when all the devices are together

[@techdad6135]

Thanks for this video Lewis! I'm curious if you've noticed any wireless interference problems on the 2.4 band? I once setup Room Assistant on a few RPI zero w's. It ended up causing issues with some of my smart light switches. I was graphing wireless stats in graphana and noticed that with room assistant running I had a high level of retries on the 2.4 spectrum.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Thanks! I haven't but if you've been keeping up with the smart home protocols videos we talked about the importance of a strong wireless network if you want to have a lot of wireless IoT devices!

[@FredSchmitthammer]

We need this for the Shelly Plus 1

[@iBeechus]

Great video. I’ve set 3 up, and now need to buy more to fill out the rest of the house. “No one in this room for 5 minutes, turn off lights and devices”

[@DIYtechie]

Very cool project and great video. I already bought some ESP32 and have been playing around with ESPHome ble tracking without much luck. My impression was that it failed because iPhones, AirTags and the latest Tiles (what I have available) use bluetooth MAC address randomisation to prevent everyone else from tracking you over time and space. If someone with malicious intent were to enter your fitbit MAC address, they would be able to track you around the world, albeit only in places with hackable computers and other hardware using BLE.

[@EverythingSmartHome]

There is an option inside of ESPresense to help with the randomisation!

[@jasonwarm3188]

@@EverythingSmartHome I wish there was a better explanation of what this was. My house is full of Apple devices, could not reliably track my Apple Watch at all. The page lists using "continuity footprints" but no where is there a practical discussion of HOW to use them.

[@crushkitty]

It works really great... but not sure due that i use a D1 mini... but after a few hours it stops finding the trackers....but after a restart it continue to work perfect....

[@Steephsel]

Ordered an ESP32 board and some other stuff today, is there any way to measure distance from integrated BLE/BT on the Raspberry and knowing who is in the living room (in my case)? This would work nicely with the ESP32 I plan to put in the bedroom.

[@jonasholm539]

Would be great with a follow up on this.

[@crushkitty]

O WOW this is amazing.... i was considering room assistant, but now with the chip shortage, adding a pi zero in each room it gets a little expensive

[@EverythingSmartHome]

Yeah I agree!

[@techbyfinne]

Great video !!! When the room name "Finnes Office" is shown in Home Assistent it shows as finnes_office? Any way that the underscore can be removed?

[@Madeyalookdomoz]

Any idea how to configure the supported sensors in espresense?

[@cobusbenade3502]

Absolutely awesome video! Also so glad there is a option for iOS devices. Tried a ton of options and was terrible for apple based devices. Also support the idea to merge with ESPHome. Have a couple of motion sensors already part of my ESP32s. So would also make sense for me. Keep up the great work!

[@Kiloptero]

There is a way to accelerate the refresh from the iPhone.. is a little slow:(

[@ModMINI]

my iPhone is showing a different MAC address inside the device from in the espresence logs. Do iPhone rotate the MAC address for bluetooth? I know they do this for WiFi.

[@samratmore]

Those are updating Esprensense with version v3.x.x, note that "Send to rooms topic" will be deprecated. Change state_topic: "espresense/rooms" to state_topic: "devices/johns_iphone" so you will not get "not_home" in topics while checking sensor in developer tools. Instead you will see correct room name which you set, for instance bedroom.