I'm using Ecobee Suite Manager 1.8.55 and I was under the impression from reading other posts here that my Ecobee room sensors would be available for presence in HE rules? When I try to setup a "presence" trigger, I only get my phone as a device option, though.
Using Ecobee's native HK integration, it is reporting occupancy, so there's that. Ultimately I'd like to have the presence/occupancy exported from HE via Maker API integration so I can use it in a Node-RED flow ... but I'm a little stuck now because of the above.
Is there something additional I need to setup in the suite?
That seems likely. The driver code in GitHub includes the capability “motion sensor.”
“Presence” used to refer pretty much exclusively to arrival/departure from home. Motion was for, well, motion while in a certain area of the home.
Although now with sensors that use mm-wave, it’s possible to recognize someone as “present” within a specific part of the home, even if they’re not moving. And there have always been certain workarounds like using a pressure sensor while someone’s asleep in a bed or on a couch.
The Home Assistant local integration (which acts like a HomeKit controller that the Ecobees locally talk to) does seem to report both presence and occupancy on the Ecobee sensors. Here are three of my sensors:
But I'm not sure if the Ecobee sensors actually distinguish between these two things. I think the occupancy merely resets 30 minutes after motion ends. You can see that's when occupancy turns off each time here:
Both the Hubitat built-in integration and the Ecobee Suite Manager expose the occupancy status as motion (as shown in @bobbyD's post). I wonder if that is all that is available in the cloud API. It certainly would be nicer if the actual motion attribute was exposed.
You can either take the route that @jlv has, making your ecobee 100% local, or as an alternative, create a virtual presence sensor, and a rule that controls the status of this virtual sensor based on the motion status of the ecobee sensors.
