Add ability to restrict beacons from certain scanners or tie beacons to a particular scanner

[jsheheane]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I live in a 2 story house. My master bedroom is directly over my garage. I have scanners in both the garage and the master bedroom. Usually my car reports it's location properly, but sometimes (fairly frequently) the beacon from my car reports it's location as my master bedroom. To my knowledge my car has never been and should never be in my bedroom.

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be handy if we could restrict certain beacons from specific scanners (ignore their beacons to that device) or otherwise "pin" a certain beacon to a specific scanner if we know that's the only scanner it should ever report in to.

Describe alternatives you've considered
There's probably other ways to solution this that people smarter than me might have. Maybe some RSSI/Attenuation tuning dark magic, but this seems like a pretty rock solid way to solve for this issue rather than mucking about with tuning.

Additional context
Loving the app and appreciate all the work you're putting into it!

[agittins]

Hi @jsheheane, glad you are enjoying the app! I think multi-storey buildings are always going to be a bit tricky - it seems a lot of floor/ceiling materials are more transparent to RF than most walls!

To my knowledge my car has never been and should never be in my bedroom.

If you know that a beacon should only belong to one proxy, I'd suggest instead just using the device_tracker entity (the Home/Away one), that way you don't need to deal with which area it's in, just whether it is visible or not.

In the more general case, the next version of Bermuda will have per-scanner and per-device calibrations, so you can alter the "perceived" rssi for devices. You can try it out via HACS in the "re-download" menu, and enabling "show beta versions". v0.6.9rc2 is the one you want (at this point in time). The UI is a bit clunky, but hopefully the steps are clear enough - let me know if you could use some pointers.

In the more-more-general case(!) trilateration will hopefully help with this, but I haven't got past the basic proof-of-concept of that yet, and no experiments yet with multi-floor setups, so that might take a bit longer to find out how reliable a fix we can create.

For what you can do right now, though...

• Try to maximise the separation between proxies, while still keeping the key ones close to where the desired beacons are. Eg, on the ground floor, keep you proxies at waist height or below, so they aren't getting too close to the floor above. Likewise upstairs, maybe desk height or higher (maybe not too high if you have an attic that you've got scanners in) and then on the top floor have proxies shoulder height to ceiling height. The further apart beacons are (both horizontally and vertically) the more easily they can differentiate which one a beacon is closest to. It's really hard for RSSI to make a call between 2.1 metres versus 2.8 metres, but much easier comparing 1.5m to 3.2 metres.
• Try out the per-scanner calibration menu in "configure". If you find that a problem proxy is actually much more sensitive, you can add an offset to it so that it reads further away for all beacons. Even if it doesn't read closer, you might still want to apply a positive offset to it (so it reads further away) just so beacons don't "jump" into that area unless they really are quite close. Things can get a bit confusing there, but I'm happy to help you work out a good solution if you're happy to share screenshots and some mud-maps of how your house is laid out (exclude the safe location and the secret exit from the underground lair, naturally).
• Some folk have even applied some foil sheeting on a wall next to a scanner, so it didn't read so strongly for signals in the next room!

I think in the case where you only care about a beacon's proximity to a single proxy, it's most likely that it actually doesn't matter which proxy, it just matters if it's home or not - and the home/away device_tracker entity is good for that (It's usually named "Bermuda Tracker" in the device screen). You can adjust how quickly it times out (5 minutes or more is usually a good setting) so you don't get nuisance triggering - that's the Device Tracker Timeout setting.

Another option is that if you click the "+n entities not shown" in the device page:

Then you can enable the "Distance to Garage" or similar sensor, which will give you a direct measurement between that device and the chosen proxy/scanner. These however also have a "cooldown" filter, in that they will hold their value for a while after a device actually leaves - I think it's about 10 seconds or so, from memory.

(I wouldn't recommend any of the "Unfiltered" ones, they're really for testing the filters and aren't much use for automations).

[agittins]

Oh, sidenote.. there will be a feature to exclude certain scanners from being involved in any distance calculations, so that (say) a vacuum with a scanner mounted on it won't mess up the calculations, but that's a different thing from what you are looking to solve.

[reedstrm]

Good stuff here, but I'm trying to wrap my head around the use case of a scanner on a vacuum: A beacon, sure, but a scanner? To avoid sucking up your misplaced phone? I'm assuming robot vacuum? Are you building hunter robots? Do we need to keep SkyNet away from your home network? Have I asked enough questions?

[agittins]

Good stuff here, but I'm trying to wrap my head around the use case of a scanner on a vacuum: A beacon, sure, but a scanner? To avoid sucking up your misplaced phone? I'm assuming robot vacuum? Are you building hunter robots? Do we need to keep SkyNet away from your home network? Have I asked enough questions?

Your intense curiosity has been noted and forwarded to the relevant public databases. You can expect to receive appropriate re-training when the mobile units are next in your sector. Thank you for your understanding and expected compliance.

[agittins]

@jsheheane how did you go - did any of the options I suggested help out with your problem, or did you find another solution? If you just haven't had a chance to try them out that's all good too - just wanted to see how you're going with it :-)