Presence detection in a smart home environment

Sebastian DOHLE <dohlese65595@th-nuernberg.de>
Lennart HEIMBS <heimbsle69869@th-nuernberg.de>
Kevin HOLZSCHUH <holzschuhke56905@th-nuernberg.de>
Johannes KRUG <krugjo67713@th-nuernberg.de>

Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg (Germany)

Abstract - In this paper, we present a smart home setup, based on a raspberry pi, that allows for the implementation of custom sensors, developed by this team, as well as of the shelf commercial sensors. We describe the necessary software used for sensor implementation, networking, logic and user interface. Detecting the presence of persons in a room demonstrates the usefulness of the setup.

Keywords: Smart Home, Presence detection, Node-red, mqtt, gateway, raspberry pi

1. INTRODUCTION
  The market for smart home ecosystems is currently heavily fragmented. https://www.statista.com/study/42112/smart-home-report/
  A couple of market-leaders like eq-3, Amazon and Control4 have already established their own ecosystems with their own networking protocolls.
  Since the market is still growing, more companies join the smart home market with their own solutions and the vast variety of communication protocolls is ever growing.
  Existing community projects like FHEM, ioBroker and openHAB try to address this by providing a unified interface for a number of protocolls.
  Because these projects either lack in usability (FHEM), require the knowledge of a specifiy programming language (openHAB) or lack customizability (ioBroker) we will describe in this paper a three-layered implementation of a highly customizable and easy to program solution.
  Section 2 covers the used hardware and communications design for the smart home environment. 
  The used software, why the software was used and how it works is described in section 3 and in section 3 
  Section 2 contains the outline of the setup used and we will describe the specific components and explain why they are used in Section 3