Presence Sensor, not Motion

Hey HE Community, question... My google skills are letting me down. I am looking for a solid "presence" sensor solution, not motion. How do I distinguish between "presence sensors" and motion sensors?

For me, a motion sensor is something that goes active when somebody moves in front of it.
Presence for me is something that detects when I leave my 'geofence' area, say 200m radius.

For motion it can be an Aqara/Xiaomi/Sonoff/Hue/Neo Coolcam/Fibaro etc. motion sensor.

For presence it is Life360/Locative/Tado/HE's phone app.
Is this what you are getting at?

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AFAIK, there aren't any Hubitat-compatible presence sensors that work in a context of rooms within a house. Xiaomi makes one, but I don't think it is easily available. Not sure if it is compatible with Hubitat either.

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From my research, "presence" will detect the motion of a finger movement. "Motion" will pick up an arm movement, or an ambulatory movement such as walking, etc...

What I am trying to do is power down switches in a particular zone, after presence is not detected for a certain amount of time. HOWEVER, the tricky part, such as when setting at my desk for an extended period of time, I do not want the room to power down. From what I have researched that is there the benefit of a presence sensor comes into to play.

I have Life360 integrated, it is just not sensitive enough from my understanding to manage individual zones within the same home. Although I might be ignorant in that statement. :slight_smile:

While not particularly elegant, I accomplish this by using multiple motion sensors tied together with the Zone Motion Controller app. One motion sensor "watches" the room and another "watches" me. When one becomes active lights turn on. When both are inactive for five minutes the lights turn off.

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I think what you're looking for is called an "Occupancy" sensor not "Presence" and not motion. The best one that works with Hubitat currently are the Lutron Occupancy sensors but they require Lutron RadioRA 2 to integrate.

The next best thing I can think of would be the NYCE Zigbee motion sensors. They are very sensitive and have a fast reset time of about 10 seconds. Alternative would also be the Hue Motion sensor which are sensitive and have a fast reset time. However these are "motion" sensors so they will come on and then reset after the timeout period. They do NOT reset if motion is detected in between the events of motion/reset.

Supposedly the Shelly Motion does reset during a motion event. I have not tested and don't know if it works with HE.

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I was contemplating something similar, just have a ton motion sensors and create a room as a zone. If motion is not detected on anyone of them for a time-frame, then power down the zone/room. Just seems so unelegant.

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I have my office lights and monitors tied to my keyboard & mouse
If no movement within x mins/secs turn everything off

This helps when just scrolling a webpage and not really moving.
It just keeps a virtual motion sensor ‘active’ if any mouse movement or keyboard strokes and goes ‘inactive’ after a configured amount of time

Andy

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Which devices can do this? Do you have an example of one (even if not compatible with Hubitat)?

That is just brilliant!

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Just a little .exe (Compiled script) And driver that I wrote a while ago because I was having issues with normal motion sensors.
It’s been working well for me for a while.
I’m not too sure but I think @Royski uses it too

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Is it available on your website?

Wish there was a pressure/weight sensitive switch for the toilet seat in our bathroom for long periods of no motion ...

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At the moment no.
I just wrote it for my own use and never intended releasing it.

I believe someone has already released something similar here:

Although I don’t need maker api for mine to work

Andy

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I use a camera linked to tinyCam which support object detection (including face and person). When I'm sitting in the lounge watching TV or suchlike, the camera sees me (either face or person) and sends an http GET to an app on HE that sets a virtual motion sensor (eg. living_room_samsung_cam_person) to active. It updates every 30 seconds automatically. It means I can remain motionless and the lights will stay on. If I leave the room, the lights go off. I only use motion detectors not cameras to trigger the light on in the first place, because cameras are notoriously poor at false triggers (eg. light or shadow changes etc). But for presence sensing using object detection to keep the lights on, it is very reliable.

Take a look at this thread...

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Years ago I was introduced to these sensors Panasonic grid eye. At the time they were hard to get! I always wanted to develop room sensors with these things, maybe I should look at them again :grin: you would be amazed what can be done with them. From room presence/movement to hand motion gestures. The great feature is, it can tell if there someone there and if the motion is to leave the room or enter.
Ada fruit grid eye

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@marktheknife

OK.. I looked again at the install/setup for the previously linked 'PC Motion Sensor'
It looks quite complicated so I decided to release my much easier to configure system

It's just a special driver and a little .exe program to run on your PC it does not require the use of Maker API.
I will stress that I have only tested this myself but have not found any serious problems along the way

It is on my website under 'New Stuff'
Please read the instructions, but essentially, you create a new device with the virtual driver, configure the PC ip address then run the .exe on the PC
On first run, it will create an 'ini' file which holds the configuration data for the app

Andy

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Andy you are a rock star :metal:!

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This works great. Mind blown :exploding_head:.

In addition to placing a shortcut in the startup folder, is it possible to run the .exe as a windows service, using something like NSSM?

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Looking back at my instructions, even by my standards it is much more complicated than it needs to be. If you can make a simpler version that's great. I would like to go back to it at some point and set it up as a Windows Service, which would cut out a lot of the steps required to install and configure it. Nice work on also cutting out the requirement for Maker API.

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