Automation - Presence

Why this plugin

HomeKit does a brilliant job detecting when someone is home but it only works with iOS devices. If you have a guest, you must invite him/her to the Home app (assuming he/she has an iPhone). HomeKit can tell you if someone is home but can't tell you which room is occupied.

This plugin:

• Support for people presence using devices that are not iPhones.
• Support for "Zones" so you can determine the presence in areas of your house.
• Easier automation by track presence by zone without having to check the value of multiple sensors.
• Support for a "Master presence" sensor to know if there's presence if any of your zones. The true "someone is home".
• State is persisted on disk, so it will survive reboot/restart of homebridge.
• Every change in state is logged on file for future analysis.

What is a zone?

This plugin lets you create one or more "zones". A zone can be a room (e.g. Living Room), a group of rooms (e.g. Upstairs), a group of devices (e.g. Guests) or a group of sensors (e.g. Someone is in bed).

You give a "zone" the semantic you like.

Some example of zones:

• By room: Living Room, Bedroom, Bathroom
• By area: Upstairs, Downstairs, Outside
• By collection of sensors: Bedroom bed, Couch (to link multiple sensors together and stop lights to turn on if someone is in bed, for example)
• By personal devices, people presence: myself, partner, kid, cleaner, guests

What are triggers?

For every zone you can define a list of triggers. When one or more triggers are On, the zone is On.

For example, let's assume you have a zone Living room.

Here's the triggers you could have to detect presence:

• Motion sensors
• Audio streaming (turn On the switch when you stream audio and turn the switch Off when you stop streaming; works well with homebridge-automation-chromecast)
• Lights are on (unless they are triggered by motion sensors)
• Media player is playing (e.g. Plex media player, see homebridge-plex)
• Vibration sensors for your furniture (e.g. the Xiaomi/Aqara Vibration sensor, see homebridge-hue with deconz)

About using non-iPhones to track people presence

You can use Bluetooth to track who's home.

For example, you could track personal devices like phones, smart watches, headphones / earphones or fitness trackers.

You could also buy some cheap "iTag" devices or Tile trackers to attach to the dog, your keys, the keys you give to your guests, etc.

You can detect if a Bluetooth device is at home by using my homebridge-automation-bluetooth-presence plugin.

Config

Example config.json:

{
  "accessory": "AutomationPresence",
  "name": "Home Presence",
  "masterPresenceOffDelay": 600,
  "zones": [
    {
      "name": "Zone 1 name",
      "triggers": [
        {
          "name": "Trigger 1 name"
        },
        {
          "name": "Trigger 2 name"
        },
        {
          "name": "Trigger 3 name"
        },
        {
          "name": "..."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Zone 2 name",
      "triggers": [
        {
          "name": "Trigger 1 name"
        },
        {
          "name": "..."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "...",
      "triggers": [
        {
          "name": "..."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

This accessory will create a switch for every Trigger and a motion sensor for every Zone, including a Master motion sensor.

Turning On one or more switches will turn on the Zone they belong to. If one of more Zone is on, the Master switch is On.

Turning on all the switches will turn off the master zone after the masterPresenceOffDelay (in seconds).

Configuration options

Attribute	Required	Usage	Example
name	Yes	A unique name for the accessory. It will be used as the accessory name in HomeKit.	Home Presence
masterPresenceOffDelay	No	Number of seconds before turning Off the Master sensor, after no presence is detected	600 (600 seconds, 10 minutes)
zones	Yes	A list of one or more Zones and their Triggers	n/a