More Presence Detection
Adding to my presence detection this is another way to somewhat advance the process of knowing who is home and who not. Apart from monitoring GPS or smart devices connected to the home network.
This is an additional way to increase the sources of data to determine who is home.
Using a ESP32 Controller in my garage, which I will cover in a future post. I have added two Ultra sonic sensors to the garage roof. Using the SR-04 sensor to calculate distance, it makes this process easy to know which car is in the garage and which one is out. Reporting back the distance values each time they change, and converting that into a boolean (true/false) value, to display on the OpenHAB App which car is in the garage.
Having this type of data is useful not just for tracking cars and who is home, but doing automations such that if at least one car is gone and all required smart devices are off the network, it is almost safe to say nobody is home. Having this info at my disposal enables me to close windows blindes, and disable the keypad that opens the garage, also enabling my security notifications. These notifications are only for times that nobody is home, and if any door or window opens, a push notification is sent to my phone to let me know which door or window has opened or closed.
Below are some pictures of the display in the app and the SR-04 sensors which just a have a nice 3D printed case to mount them up on the roof beams.