Is It Possible To Use A Zigbee USB Dongle For Presence Sensing In An Automobile?

This would to replace a ST Arrival Sensor, no longer made.
Also, instead of @iharyadi 's device that he made for a little while.

My car has a USB power port.

The problem with that i believe is you need to make sure it is not a repeater or it will continually fff up your mesh

1 Like

For me the main issue w/presence devices that automate the garage door or locks is avoiding false positives - garage door opening or door unlocking unintentionally.

iharyardi's sensor has a battery and reports if it's on battery or DC power, so you can set your automations to only operate when the sensor is reporting DC (car is on/being driven). Requires that your car USB port is only powered when the car is running.

Without power reporting (DC or battery) false positives can be caused by Zigbee blips, restarting of hub, etc. and make the hub think that the car just became present/arrived and open the garage door while you're not around or even using the car. Checking power source let's you set your rule to only run when there is a presence change while the presence device is on DC power:

image

1 Like

Power reporting would be great.
I have a five minute close rule, so they don't stay open, but yes, the inadvertent openings stink.

You don't see any way to plug something off the shelf into the car's usb port that can be made to report arrival?

Never really looked very hard for off-the-shelf presence options. The only other in-car presence sensor I tried aside from iharyardi's device was BLE. I played around w/BLE a little but it wasn't as reliable as I'd hoped and once I tried iharyardi's I was sold by the ability to use DC/battery power detection.

1 Like

Do you have one of these things?
I think that you may be able to query the link status , and so determine if it's in range.
image
And use the following as the driver for it:

1 Like

I wonder how'd you do that?

Alexa Auto works extremely well as an indicator that my wife has arrived in the driveway. It send a message to my phone when it connects to Bluetooth.

Can’t say how well this would work with Android, but on iPhone (both iPhone 10 and 13 Pro) it has been very reliable. On iPhone it could be automated back to the hub with Shortcuts and HomeKit automation. On Android, tasker could probably handle the job.

I get excellent range with the zigbee ST Arrival sensor that is mounted on the windshield.
Bluetooth?

Yes it’s Bluetooth, and the range is surprisingly strong. It’s down low in the front center console, yet it connects to my phone no matter where I am in the house.

1 Like

I've found that if I have a Zigbee device powered off for a few days (because the battery died and it was low priority to replace), then when I do power it back up, it doesn't work on the mesh until I put the hub into pairing mode and the hub rediscovers the device.

Wouldn't this happen to a Zigbee device in your car if you drove away for a extended (week long) trip?

For some reason that doesnt happen to the smarthings presence sensors.

1 Like

As an additional suggestion, (I just looked this up, but have no experience with it), it seems to be possible to use a Tile Pro (a Bluetooth tracker), very easily in Home assistant, and then bring that into Hubitat with the bridge.
If you decide to go this route, see the following to get a BLE Beacon directly into Hubitat:

(seems to indicate that a Tile will work).

1 Like

Doesn't seem to. My ST arrival sensor always just works, even if I'm not home for several weeks. I travel constantly for work, so this would definitely have been a problem for me, but it just seems to work just like it should.

3 Likes

i have had terrible luck with battery life with these.. i imagine youd have to do a battery mod to get anything more than a month out of them