#monitor vs espresense?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

brisk ice
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also, will that help me not have such a cluttered mqtt space? using monitor with -b to listen for beacons leads to hundreds of random devices topics from stuff in my vicinity

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monitor vs espresense?

marsh hound
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They're quite different, ESPresence works for BTLE and my experience is that it's shit for phones, and great for tags. I gave up trying to get it as reliable as monitor for phones

brisk ice
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ok fair enough. I'd like to eventually have some room presence happening but (like I mentioned), the tags I have now are on stuff like keys and backpacks, which have a "home" of their own... and we aren't really Fitbit/watch/etc people, especially my 7yo

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so I'm thinking room presence will maybe one day end up being those FP-1 sensors or some other thing

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but maybe a combination of monitor + espresense would end up being best for overall home/away? track phones with monitor, and tags with espresense?

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also, besides the obvious "more nodes must be better", I'm guessing I will see best accuracy with at least three nodes? I currently have two and do fine, but I'm not sure if monitor itself would just work better if I added another node

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I'm a bit suspicious that my hardware is actually choking on the tags, causing those broken pipe errors, because they always come from the btle script, but I don't know enough bash script to wade through and see what's happening lol

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I think monitor has been unmaintained for quite some time as well 🙃

marsh hound
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Updated in May... hardly unmaintained

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If you assume that software gets updated as regularly as HA then you're going to be disappointed a lot

brisk ice
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the readme was updated in may

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nothing functional has been updated since oct 2020, looks like

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also there's 80+ open issues, many with no response from the dev... seems relatively unmaintained to me 😅

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not trying to come down on the guy, just looking for some possibly better solutions

marsh hound
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I have no problems with it working, the broken pipe errors don't stop it

brisk ice
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ah, fair enough

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often mine will just keep going as well, but sometimes I'll log in to see why it's not working and it's just gotten hung on that

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I've noticed it comes from a few different lines in btle, but I can't ever figure out what causes it in any of them

brisk ice
marsh hound
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No

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I found it to be different, but not better

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Then again, I'm not looking for knowing roughly which room a device is in, since I find tracking devices around the house isn't that useful

brisk ice
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you're just looking for "is the device here?", basically?

also, is there not any way to get logs from them in situ? you can only read the logs over serial when connected to PC?

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I've got at least one that is clearly getting messages but updating wrong, and I can't nail it down

marsh hound
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Yes, I don't care where the phone was left, just if it's home or away

brisk ice
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right, that's mainly what I'm thinking too

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it'd be cool if they got the room right, but I'm not at a spot where everyone is that reliable

marsh hound
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TBH my problem is that knowing where a phone is sat tells me nothing about where the relevant human is

brisk ice
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I think the "best" way I've seen that done is with double take but then you've got multiple indoor cameras, etc

brisk ice
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that makes perfect sense

marsh hound
brisk ice
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I'm like on this constant journey for better detection, been playing with bayesians, but finding that Bluetooth (in my instance) is just really hard to rely on

brisk ice
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but "who's in what room?"

marsh hound
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A PIR for quick presence detection, and the FP1 for is somebody still there

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Yeah, who's in what room is really only do-able with cameras, or weight sensors

brisk ice
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so you could relatively easily make an "all in one" sensor

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kids are tough for me as well, especially my 2nd grader. she's not really home alone ever, so I can mostly base that off of OUR presence... but there are plenty of times when I want to know when we ARE home and she ISN'T

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which I can sorta do with tod and workday binary_sensors to tell if she should be in school or whatever

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but like this week she stayed home sick, so those didn't apply

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many times she stays at grandmas, etc

marsh hound
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A BLE beacon on something she takes with her would be my approach

brisk ice
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yep, I currently have one in her school backpack

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it was acting finicky as hell with monitor, but seems to be working mostly ok with espresense

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except usually being picked up in an unexpected room

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need to grab another for her weekend bag, basically

brisk ice
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like something is definitely wrong though 🤔 my sensors in HA are reading that my devices are in the kitchen, and I am miles away with those devices on my person lol

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maybe they are not getting an away timeout?

brisk ice
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and the thing is they appear to be calibrated at least mostly dead on, according to this

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but i can verify visually that the distance reported is just wrong

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this tag is physically only about 10ft from the living_room esp

marsh hound
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Yeah, the distance is a guess, little more

brisk ice
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but definitely not 1.59... anything

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meters, feet, idk what it could be

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even TRYING to say