Ok, I feel like I've reached a point where my house is too smart for its own good.
I have multiple presence sensors, and I'm using Combined Presence, so I now have very reliable events for when my wife and I arrive/leave the house.
I also have two smart garage doors. I have a couple rules set up:
When my wife arrives home, open garage door 1
When I arrive home, open garage door 2
You can see where this is going. When we all get in the same car with the kids, when we get back, both rules trigger and both garage doors open. So I end up still having to press buttons to close the unnecessarily open one.
I tried to imagine a solution involving timing, but I don't think that gives enough info to solve it. Really, the house needs to know with CAR is arriving - not which person.
So then I thought of putting smartthings presence fobs in the two cars, but I know people have reliability issues with them, and they wouldn't trigger until we were very, very close to the house, so I think that would be a step backwards.
Other ideas... A camera pointed at my driveway and using machine learning to identify the cars? (And only opening the garage if the right person's presence sensor also just arrived?)
Has anybody tried to solve something like this?
This would be so much easier if we just had one giant garage door, but unfortunately we have two smaller ones.
Personally, we have ST presence sensors (converted to run on AA batteries) in each of the cars and they have been very reliable since using an xbee near the garage.
There are alternatives..
How about a pressure mat connected to a door contact?
Break beam sensor? (also connected to a door sensor)
Then some kind of combined presence (Obviously I use Presence Central) to have the doors open close on those combined presence
I have used all of the approaches you mention + others.
ST presence FOB
Wi-Fi with Pi Zero W
Camera motion detection
All of them work to a greater or lesser degree.
The ST FOB is severely range limited, unless you have RELIABLE repeaters. I always ended up waiting 5+ seconds for the garage to open; that is just the time it took for mine to "realize" they were home.
The Wi-Fi approach, in a sense worked the best (more on this later), but suffers from the same connection delay. Just because I could "see" the Wi-Fi signals, it didn't mean the device could/would connect; verified same behaviour with our phones.
The camera motion detection was hit and miss. More hit that miss, but enough misses to make it unreliable and prone to false openings. I did tie it to other presence devices [read: rules], but then it suffered the same lag as the previous 2.
I still don't have a FAST detection system. I do have a reliable one now.
To address your question re simultaneous arrival, I have a fast, reliable solution. You were on the right track..., and I have a garage setup similar to yours The cars are detected by Wi-Fi. If both people sensors are marked as present, via Life360 and the ST app, my rule says to open the door for the car Wi-Fi device which is NOT present. I still run WebCore on ST specifically for this purpose, as the logic to do so in RM is doable, but complicated compared to WC on ST.
The solution below does what you are looking for I am pretty sure but would require a change of hardware. Currently only integrates with IFTTT but they are looking at adding support for ST and Hubitat in the future I was told.
The camera idea is very good and inexpensive. Add two Wyze cams and limit the detection zones for each to the corresponding position of the driveway. It needs IFTTT, but will work for an additional trigger that when combined with your existing presence detection will be able to distinguish which side to open.
The Wyze cams aren’t weatherproof, but are said by many to survive the elements when in the outdoor mounts, no problem. I think there’s even a version of the outdoor mount that has a glass front cover, although it’s apparently not needed. Mine is outside and working just fine for several months now, although it’s under my porch roof. I suppose you should be able to tuck them under the eaves in most cases.
For the cases with a glass front, there’s an update (currently in beta only I think) that allows you to shut off the IR lights so they can be placed in front of windows without the reflection of the lights. That should work well for a case like that too, and we’ll probably start to see more Wyze Cam cases that incorporate the glass front with the addition of the new software feature.
