RELATED > Home Assistant: Making My Plants Talk with IoT Sensors and a Python Script entity_id: 'device_tracker.brad_nodered' entity_id: 'device_tracker.brad_owntracks' My YAML looks like this: - platform: bayesian In this case, we are going to guess the probability of whether I am home based on the states of multiple device trackers in Home Assistant.

It allows us to guess whether something is true or not based on multiple observations. The Bayesian sensor is really cool, even if I don’t fully understand the math behind it.

Node-Red – A custom GPS tracker using Node-Red, see blog post.

Tile – The Tile app tracks my phone and a beacon attached to my keys.

Hass iOS – The Home Assistant iOS app does location tracking as well as iBeacons.

Owntracks – This has been the most reliable GPS platform for me.

ping – My phone has a static IP on my wifi, so a simple ping tells whether I’m connected or not.

What works best is to add multiple trackers for each person, and then use the Bayesian sensor to look at all of them and determine if the person being tracked is home or not. In my experience, no one platform will always be correct. Take a look through the list of device tracking platforms supported by Home Assistant, there are quite a few. After trying several approaches to monitoring presence, I’ve come up with a method that is very near 100% reliable. How can we track the state of something that is not directly observable? We can’t plug ourselves directly into the internet (…yet).

If you want the lights to turn off when no one is home, the vacuum robot to run when you’re at work, or the heat to come on before you arrive home on a cold night you need to reliably be able to tell if the house is occupied. One of the most useful things to track for home automation is whether anyone is home or not.

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