ESPresense
Documentation
Hi I appreciate it's still WIP but wondered if there is any documentation or a setup guide/video?
Many thanks
Andy
I've been thinking about doing a video... Do you have specific questions?
Probably for a basic starter a full walk through, what is it, what does it do/not do, how do you use it / connect it with your espresence config in HA. Also probably worth detailing any gotchas, ways of tuning the accuracy, building a data model assuming it helps you do that. Also some basic examples of using it in an automation, maybe working with motion sensors/light as this is fairly typical use case.
Then if you wanted to do a more advance video, any optional or advanced configuration opportunities. Advanced usages maybe combining it with a bayesian sensor to improve accuracy for room pressence. Real life implementation examples combining the above and motion and how it's used in an automation. Address any questions like number of people in a room, realtime tracking, handling guests in the house.
Well it doesn't work yet, so I don't really have any advice yet. I need others to help figure all that out!
Well it doesn't work yet, so I don't really have any advice yet. I need others to help figure all that out!
Which parts of this project don't yet work? I installed it yesterday, setup the map, the nodes, and the devices to track. It's triangulating my phone's position from four nodes, but it's consistently off by at least 3 meters and it doesn't actually show up on the map (the nodes do, but the phone doesn't). Is that something I did wrong, or something that isn't working yet in the app?
The exact locations are not perfect, but for me the z is way weird. Stuff switches between floors when it shouldn't. Your position is off the map? That may be because of a bad rssi@1m. I need to make the devices clickable in the list view so you can fix that.
I've found the same with z being weird and jumping a lot, but otherwise it's relatively decent.
Personally I'd love to see more detail about what the knobs in the config file do. For instance I see sigma is 0.3 by default in the code but 0.1 in the example conf, but it's not clear what this does.
That value is the amount of weighting to add to the nearer nodes vs the far ones. I use a gaussian distribution (bell curve).
Solid! The other thing I'm really not clear on is when you'd want to put a node into multiple floors. I suppose this has the effect of making the node "count" for multiple floors, but should that be done? Or what situations might that be ideal vs. not?
That's a good question and one I honestly don't know the answer to. I already rank the nodes by distance and throw out measures that won't help so it might not matter.
This whole thing is an experiment. If someone could try both scenarios and see which works better that was be awesome!
I did give it a bit of a shot, I saw it in your example so figured there might be a good case for it somewhere. ;-) But I found it didn't really "help" anything and did cause some wonkiness, at least with my house/node layout, so I removed them.
I waned to chime in here - I have a basic espresence setup with over 10 room nodes I found your companion and I am trying to now build out my dimensions.. I have the basic coordinates now plotted for lets say the 1st floor...
i start from 0,0 and make my way around each room and such... I have the enter 1st floor mapped now with coordinates for each corner of the rooms.. There are 7 rooms just on 1st floor.... so far now... to convert this to your yaml for the rooms...
I have my garage coordinates as follows... Start 0,0 then up 6,0 then right to 6,6 and then back to 0,6 How does this look in your yaml then... I see for yours there are lots of coordinates - name: Garage points: - [0, 18] - [1.5, 18] - [1.5, 19.2] - [4, 19.2] - [4, 9] - [0, 9] - [0, 18]
I was thinking mine would only be - name: Garage points: - [0, 0] - [6, 0] - [6, 6 - [0, 6]
am I over complicating this?
My house has lots of stupid angles. If you have a square room only 4 points are needed.
I ended up manually determining the points.. there is a start and you have to go back to the start so there should be start point right most lower corner upper right corner back over to the upper left corner back to start point
So 5 points total...
A Video would be a great consolation if you dont have the time to write docs, appreciate anything you can offer :)
Some additional items I'd appreciate to see in the documentation.
I'm confused in the config.yaml as to when/why you would add a node to many floors?
In the UI, what the "Show All" is meant to do - in mine it doesn't shows all devices and doesn't show all floors, it changes nothing in the UI as far as I can tell.
Being able to pick which nodes participate in each floor seemed like a good idea at the time :) No particular reason just a knob to try and tweak.
Show all was broken #388 fixes it.
Sorry yes it works after I added all Sensors to all floors. Which I didn't feel should be necessary but yeah.. It works kind of fine so far, xy wise. Z is another story. I have 7 floors (Terrassed house with mezzanine floors) covered in 12 Sensors and the floor is really never right for my devices. Don't know how to fix this, made a suggestion to add Wall/floor absorption.
@DTTerastar - is there a way to get the correct scale in your web tool? I cannot zoom out enough and then read the variables to do the scale of my home and rooms correctly...
@DTTerastar - In Espresence (HA addon) I don't see any of my beacons or sensors floating around - MQTT definately sees them and is reporting them in the correct rooms but the ESPresence add-on for Home Assistance doesnt visually see them to troubleshoot.
You probably have a multi floor home and/or not enough sensors on the same level for triangulation. Try assigning multiple floors per sensor e.g.
floor: ["first", "second"]
Ideally, there should be a sensor in each corner plus as many more in between as you like.
First of all thank you so much for this great project ! I'm also missing of some documentation. I see a lot of settings with no clue about their role.
Regarding companion , for example i cannot see my tile on the map ; it is present in device page, it has 2 fixes, but scale = n/a i suspect that scale , but how/where to set this? why it exists ? optimisation section is also really obscure to me :) Oh ! and Calibration page is empty, i found no info at all about this...
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