Next school year, my son will be left home after school for a few hours while my wife and I are at work. I’m looking for a way to detect when he’s home and have the front door unlock (among other automation scripts that are in place).
I came across this post and was going to get the Tile Pro as it seemed to check off all my requirements:
Then I came across some concerning articles regarding data harvesting. The whole reason I started self-hosting was to prevent data harvesting, so it seems like the Tile is a non-starter for me.
Has anyone been in this (or a similar) situation? Mainly, I’m looking for a device I can put in my son’s backpack that can trigger when he’s within range, so the house will open for him. BLE seems like it might be a solution, though I run my server on an old Dell r720 enterprise server in my basement, so I don’t currently have Bluetooth functionality (and it’s pretty far away from the front door, 20+ feet), though getting that is not a dealbreaker for me.
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
Are you comfortable with flashing microcontrollers? https://esphome.io/components/bluetooth_proxy.html might be a solution to your BLE beacon idea. buy any esp32 board for like 5$, put it somewhere in your living room or wherever makes sense and have it proxy BLE scans to HomeAssistant.
While I’ve never messed with an esp board, it’s something I was planning on learning in order to create a few other things, so this might be the best time to start.