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:
- I could put it in his backpack where it can be forgotten.
- long battery life.
- Through the Home Assistant integration, it can trigger when it gets in range.
- It also has a few other beneficial things, so I was thinking of putting one on each of our bicycles in case they’re ever stolen. Hell, I could look into putting one on my cat’s collar in case she ever gets out.
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.
- Addendum: To people saying just get a key: we have a key for him. I have a monolith sized server in my basement that automates most everything in my house these days, and was curious if anyone had set up something similar to what I was thinking. Home automation is very much a hobby, and I’m using it to learn new things.
What I’ve done is wired a different type of USB port to each door where the doorknob would exist. My kids and spouse all carry a different thumb drive for each door with the proper conversion adapter permanently attached so they know which door it belongs to. Each family member only uses the door for which they have the “key”. My wife prefers the back door. The USB port solution helps to deny access to certain rooms inside the house too as I’ve wired ports on those doors too. For instance I have a room where I keep the liquor that I can block the kids from accessing.
Each port is connected to a different RPI5 that runs software that upon a device insert reads a special file named for the date. Inside that file is the name of the family member so the script knows who it is. It then updates a spreadsheet hosted in Google Cloud so I can view it from anywhere. Google sends me push notifitations when this happens.
The beauty is that if one of my family loses their thumb drive I just make another and rotate the adapters so the old one won’t work anymore. My wife is the biggest culprit of this. She doesn’t work and is home all day but she still has a pretty busy life based on all the action that back door sees. But it has lead to a bug - more on that later.
It’s a pretty flawless solution - I’m so proud of it I’ve given my tech savvy neighbor a thumb drive of his own to help test the system. Like I mentioned I have one bug to fix tho.
It seems like every time my wife loses her thumb drive there is some ghosting in the logs. For instance, I’ll see a push notification with her name and a the back door opening and then a few minutes later another rear entry with her name attached but never an exit between events. Maybe an hour later then I’ll see an exit.
My neighbor always seems to do his testing while I’m at work too cuz I’ll see his name show up. My wife has mentioned he’ll stop by for a half hour or hour a couple times a week and answer questions about the system and tech. I think she wants to get a job in tech.
Another bug I’ve only seen happen a few times is the back door opening with my wife’s thumb key, the neighbor entering the back door, and then my wife’s name showing another back door event. I’ve called her on the phone to have her (and the neighbor if he’s there) troubleshoot during this and she is definitely home but she sounds really hurried and out of breath. I don’t know what she is watching on TV but it sounds like several guys arguing and when I ask why it’s so loud she gets worked up and has to mute the phone for a bit.
Actually now that I think about it I’ve started getting notifications of back door entries after my wife has gone to bed and I’m working on projects in the basement. It’s soundproofed down there so I can listen to music without waking her. I swear tho I’ll hear some off-timed thumping after these events.
But yeah, I really like the tech I got going on and my wife thinks it’s the best idea I’ve had. I think for v2 I’d like to implement a secret knock each family member has instead of the thumb drive so there’s nothing to lose. It would be much easier for my wife’s back door entry. I swear she squealed with delight when I told her how much time would be saved on entry just by a few properly timed forceful hits to a sensor on the back door. She wanted to try it out immediately!
Good luck!