Our current house is rather spread out with some workshops off the garage, an outdoor shop and upstairs rooms. I would like to be able to locate my family, sort of like the Weasley's special clock, to show which room they are in. I'm thinking of an ESP32 that uses bluetooth to automatically connect to a phone that is within range. I would put one of these in each room and have them send through wifi presence/absence information to a small system to aggregate and show locations.
Anybody try this before? Any alternatives to recognizing the presence of a particular cell phone a particular location?
I know I'll have to pair each phone with each sensor, but I can't think of anything simpler
Yes, but the units will be more than 60 ft apart and I can also attempt to track movement to decide the from/to vector. Or, perhaps differentiate signal strength. Looking for any possible options or existing and related builds.
You don't have to connect to the phone, just read its advertising data to identify it and get the signal strength to determine which ESP it's closest to. RF does go through walls, but I have seen this method work. Generally if each ESP has an unblocked line of sight to the phone, then even if there one closer on the other side of a wall, the one in the same room will have a stronger signal. That's generally, but not always, true.