Using Bluetooth for Presence Detection

Interesting idea. I have often thought presence detection would be useful but not thought of how to implement it. Must admit though Bluetooth is over my head at the moment but I would love to see it implemented. 

Is this something your capable of testing? Would be willing to beta test for you :)

sure Brett will have some thoughts on the feasability of this. 

garry

A bluetooth node would be the way to go.   This way it keeps the hardware out of the HAH system, and makes it more independent of the control head.

Much like the serial relay board I coded up recently.  Its a complely self contains xAPBSC compliant node.
http://www.dbzoo.com/livebox/ethrelay

I would do the same sort of thing with bluetooth.    A bluetooth unit mounted onto top of some motherboard carrier which recieves the signal and pumps out some xAP packet to let you know when another bluetooth device is in range.   That xAP packet would be pushed straight down an ethernet cable, or out via RF if you wish so you could HahNode enable it.

After that its just LUA scripting on the HAH to decide what to do next.

Brett

You're quite right that bluetooth is probably more flexible and reliable.

This project:

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/new-products/hack-your-heating-using-an-i...

is something that I found which uses an interesting take on geofencing to control heating.

As my heating is already controlled by the HAH the hardware extension would be unnecessary and therfore just a bit of lua scripting would probably achieve the same result. (OK I admit it, I don't really do hardware so I'm always looking for a software only solution:-)

Your are quite right, hc05 required rather than hc06.

i now have one on the way from china, in the meantime I'll have a go at coding a jeenode and lua applet up based on the data sheet and test via dummy serial commands from a PC.  Due to existing hardware being present on my system I am opting to integrate via jeenode rf back to the HAHcentral/serial route.

I'll post if I have any success.

Garry

ordered :) let the hack fest begin 

Whew! What a big subject presence detection is. I (and Mr Google) have had a look at a few things over the last
couple of days and there's a lot of stuff about how difficult it is to make sense of.

I'm sure that you hardware guys will have a good time hacking the HC-05 and that may be the best route, but perhaps
an alternative is to use a Raspberry Pi. I have one sitting next to my HAH anyway so I've had a look at doing stuff
with a blue tooth dongle inserted in it.

Here's a few observations:


This site:
http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/userforum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4894&s...

uses a cron setting and a couple of bash scripts to detect phones using wifi

cron:
# detect iPhone on network
*/1 * * * * ~/bin/iphonecron &> /dev/null

iphonecron
#!/bin/bash

for((i=1; $i<=12; i=$(($i+1)))); do
~/bin/iphonecheck
sleep 4
done

iphonecheck
#!/bin/bash
IPHONELASTONLINE=`cat /tmp/iphonestate 2>/dev/null`
ISONLINE="false"
/sbin/ping -t 1 -c 1 192.168.1.117 &>/dev/null && ISONLINE="true" && sleep 1

if [[ "$ISONLINE" != "$IPHONELASTONLINE" ]]; then
osascript -e "tell application \"IndigoServer\" to set value of variable \"PresenceiPhone\" to \"$ISONLINE\""
fi

echo $ISONLINE > /tmp/iphonestate

I don't think that wifi really works but the ping can be changed to l2ping and the bluetooth MAC address and it seems
to work OK. Also with bluetooth it's not required to do the check every 5 seconds because bluetooth will get a response
more reliably than wifi. That said, not all bluetooth pings are reliable, iPhone's don't respond to l2ping when asleep
but my old motorola seems fairly reliable.

Obviously I don't do the "Indigoserver" stuff above. I'm working on a python script which just reads /tmp/iphonestate
and serves it up to a socket which the HAH could listen on.

The python script will probably be something like this:

from subprocess import *

import os

import socket





# new style - subprocess



phonecheck = Popen("cat /tmp/iphonestate",shell=True, stdout=PIPE).stdout


while 1:

line = phonecheck.readline()

if not line: break

lastword = line


clientsocket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

clientsocket.connect(('192.168.0.2', 8089))

clientsocket.send(lastword)




After that it would be just a lua script on the HAH to decide what to do with the information.

Not 100% sure, so other views would be welcome, but neither my iPhone 3GS nor the wife's 4S respond to a scan or a ping when asleep. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong and (like you) I'd kinda hoped that the iPhone could be the basis of the presence detection.

When I switch bluetooth on on the iphones and they are discoverable they show up on a scan and also respond to a ping but when they are asleep I can't seem to get any response.

I haven't tried yet but it looks like it might be possible to setup the iPhone "Find My Friends" app to generate an email notification which could then be converted to a tweet by IFTTT. An issue with that would be the reliability of the app and the time lag between the notification and the tweet actually doing anything useful on the HAH. The site I mentioned above does discuss the possibility of forcing the iphone to wake up by sending some kind of push notification to it, but at that point I feel it's becoming to cumbersome to be useful. Having said that, if it's a case of adjusting a thermostat when the house is empty then even a 20 minute delay wouldn't really be an issue.

Look forward to hearing anyone else's experience of pinging sleeping iPhones.

Just found this on the Dreamgreenhouse site:

iPhones don't enable Bluetooth unless they are paired to one or more devices. The iPhone 3GS doesn't respond to pings and always appears off-line though.

I don't think either of the iPhones I've tried is paired to anything (is there actually anything that you can pair to that is worthwhile?? :-(.  So perhaps that is part of the issue.

My iPhone is a 3GS on iOs 6 and my wife has a 4S on iOs 7. I've just dug out an old bluetooth headset to see if I can get it to pair with the 4S (it'll need a couple of hours charging first though). The pi can certainly send UDP data though whether it's possible to make them into xap packets I'm not sure. The HAH example lua scripts have a tcpRelayApplet which I thought could be used as the basis for an applet to pick up a tcp message from the pi and convert it to a xap message.

I'll see what a charged up bluetooth headset achieves tomorrow.

As a second option I now have a python script working on th pi that handles both the pinging
and transmitting to the HAH just in case the cron/bash script combo proves to be too flaky.

The python script pings the phones and then transmits the result as a UDP datagram. This is
picked up by the udp2xap.lua program running on the HAH and converted to an xap message which
in xfxviewer looks like this:

xap-header
{
uid=FF00CC00
source=dbzoo.lua.socket
hop=1
class=udp.data
v=12
}
body
{
port=41737
data=3GS away
ip=192.168.0.3
}

It looks like presence detection using bluetooth is very doable.
The next stage of actually deciding how to use the information might be more challenging!

I'm sure that that's the intention, thought I have no experience of using Python on the HAH. Lua seems to be the scripting language of choice on the HAH because it runs natively and is probably as flexible as Python. I'm pretty sure that the simple Python script that I'm using on the pi will be easily translated into Lua. 

That might be worth a look although basically as long as the info gets to the HAH it can be processed there just as easily in whatever plugboard applet is going to be used to deal with it.