this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Absolutely ludicrous to paint this development as anything but the wet dream of both a burglar and a police state.
Home automation nerds would also cream their pants if they could get their hands on this. Imagine you could use your existing wifi router to detect presence in your home. Say goodbye to shitty IR sensors that forget about your existence within 3 seconds, no more finicky radar modules that are either too sensitive or not nearly sensitive enough.
I literally just have my machine ping my phone every ten seconds. Surprisingly effective presence detection.
How would one go about setting this up? Because that sounds really cool for home automation.
There is this Home Assistant integration which I remember getting working. I haven't used Home Assistant in a while though, so I can't be a good resource if you need any help.
It's a very crude way of detecting presence for a variety of reasons, and likely won't be as useful as you imagine.
The biggest problem is how modern smartphones handle networking when they're locked. They enter a power saving state where they don't respond to all pings, or they respond late enough that the pinger decides the device is just not there. Of course there are ways around it, but those are things you need to do explicitly so it won't work on all devices until you've taken the time to set it up.
And since it detects a mobile device's existence in the local wireless network rather than the actual presence of a human being, it's not very flexible at all. What if you want to detect the presence of a guest? Are you gonna make sure they're on your network with their devices set up to properly respond to pings? What if you forgot to turn on your phone's wifi after turning it off?
I mean it does work once you've set it up, but do expect it to have a very limited scope in what you can and cannot do with it.