![]() Find yourself a small enough iBeacon to fit on a cat's or dog's collar, and you will be able to know where in your home the creature is hiding. In the same way you can track yourself, you can also track your pets. They can obviously only be tracked them when turned on, but it does allow you to see their last location in your home. If I were to fully equip my home with room-assistant, I'd know their location instantly. For example, most headphones use Bluetooth, and coincidentally, I own a pair I frequently lose down the back sofa. It seems logical, but it took me until I had installed room-assistant myself, that you can track things besides phones and watches. Tracking devices and pets, and not humans, with room-assistant If you do want to use both simultaneously, you should purchase a Bluetooth USB adapter. It is also advised that you don't use Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy on the same device, as it can degrade the performance. Though even then, the setup isn't as straight-forward as with other devices. The only option is to use Bluetooth Classic if you absolutely insist on tracking your Apple Watch. ![]() Despite using BLE, Apple won't allow apps such as room-assistant to track them. As a watch, it is almost certainly the device you have on your person most frequently. The Apple Watch is another pain-point for room-assistant users. With monitor being the successor to the vastly inferior presence, that application shouldn't be considered any more. And while the project hasn't been archived, the last release was over two years ago. For monitor to work, you will need to pair your phone with every machine running it, making the setup rather complicated. One alternative to room-assistant is monitor. ![]() If you still want to use room-assistant and PIR motion sensors, you are in luck, as you can hook up one to the Raspberry Pi room-assistant is running on. Humidity sensors are great for tracking a person in the shower or bath, but apart from that scenario, they aren't effective. PIR motion sensors rely on rather large movements and when sitting at your desk or lying on the couch for longer periods, they might not be able to pick up any movement. There are many ways of detecting presence on a room-level. Where other room-level presence detectors fail Before buying a similar device, I suggest you do a quick search in your favourite search engine to find out whether someone else has tried to use the tracker you want with room-assistant. These have the added bonus of not just acting as iBeacons, but also as key finders. If you already own one of these, you are in luck. Other commercially available tracker, such as the Tile and Nut, have been confirmed to be working with room-assistant. Luckily though, this issue was troubling the developer too, and there now is a small companion app that allows you to track your iOS and iPadOS devices in room-assistant using BLE. Because Apple opts to randomize the BLE address for privacy reasons, there was no easy way of tracking iPhones and iPads out of the box. Until recently, this left iPhone users in a bit of a conundrum. ![]() With BLE, you will also experience faster response times and more stability, partially due to the decreased interference. While there are ways of lessening the interference between Wi-Fi and Zigbee, bringing a third player in to the game would unnecessarily complicate things. That's the same band that Wi-Fi and Zigbee use. The problem with Bluetooth (or Bluetooth Classic, as it is referred to in the documentation), is that it uses the 2.4 GHz band. Good question, and one that is easily answered: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) all the way. Should I Bluetooth or Bluetooth Low Energy for room-assistant? When the individual instances work together, they can triangulate your position based on the signal strengths, and in return tell Home Assistant where exactly you are. They allow you to run multiple room-assistant instanced on the same network, and have them come together as a cluster. room-assistant clustersĬlusters are room-assistant's secret weapon, for it is them that allow the application to track on a room by room basis. So if you are already running Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi, you might as well make use of its available radios. There is also a room-assistant add-on available for Home Assistant.
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