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Presence Simulation

This Home Assistant component aim to provide a presence simulation in your home while you are away. It will turn on & off lights, switches, covers... based on your history.

How it works

It will look in the DB for the states history of all the entities configured in the component for a period corresponding to a delta variable defined in the component. It will apply to the entites the same state (and some attributes like brightness and rgb_color) as it was delta days ago, in order to simulate your presence. If the service is running longer than the number of days defined as the delta, the component will simply be reset and start over, until the stop service is called.

Supported entities domains:

• light
• cover
• media_player
• All domains for which entities have status on or off than can be turned on/off with service homeassistant.turn_on and homeassistant.turn_off (automation, switch, group...).

Pre-requisit

The history integration must be activated - which it is by default. The period kept in the DB should be bigger than the delta used in the simulation. The default number of days kept is 10 and this can be configured with the recorder integration.

Tutorials

• Smart Home Junkie's English tutorial: https://youtu.be/OTQu3BMr3EU
• Tristan's Smartes Heim's German tutorial: https://youtu.be/5vCp3iKZb4Q

Installation

Option 1

• In your Home Assistant configuration directory (~/.homeassistant for instance), create a directory custom_components/presence_simulation and put the code in it.
• Restart Home Assistant

Option 2

• Go in your Home Assistant configuration directory (~/.homeassistant for instance)
• git clone https://github.com/slashback100/presence_simulation.git. It will create the directory custom_components/presence_simulation
• Restart Home Assistant

Option 3 (recommended)

• Have HACS installed, this will allow you to easily manage and track updates.
• You can either search for "Presence Simulation" or use this link .
• Click Install below the found integration.
• Restart Home Assistant

NB: it can also be added as a custom repository if you have an issue with above procedure

Configuration

• In the UI, go in Configuration > Integration (or click here )
• Click on the '+' button
• Search for "Presence Simulation"
• Confirm:

• Set the entties or group of entities to be used in the simulation. It can be a group of lights, switches, covers, light groups, media_player or of any component that can be turned on and off with the service homeassistant.turn_on and homeassistant.turn_off. You can setup several entities. If you use a group, the simulation will act on each entity of the group independently.
• Set the number of days of history the simulation will use (the delta)
• Set the poll interval in seconds that determines how quickly the simulation notices that it has been requested to stop. Default is 30 seconds. Warning, the smaller the number you choose, the more computing process the component will take.
• After the simulation, choose to restore the states as they were before the start of ths simulation
• You can choose to randomize the activation/deactivation of your entities. '0' to disable this behaviour, a positive number (representing a number of seconds) to activate the behaviour. A random number of seconds limited to this parameter is added to (or substracted from) the time the entity was actually switched on or off in your historical data.

You can edit these configurations afterwards by clicking on Options in the integration screen.

New in version 4.0 You can create several presence simulation switches, associate them to different configurations (entities, random feature...) and turn them on and off independently.

Use it

The component will create an entity with a name computed from the name you choosed (switch.presence_simulation for example). This entity will be set to on when the simulation is running. off otherwise. You have 2 ways of launching the simulation:

With the switch

Toggling the switch (switch.presence_simulation for example) will toggle the presence simulation.

With the services

Three services are available:

Start the simulation

The service presence_simulation.start will start the simulation and set the referenced presence simulation switch entity to on.

⚠️ From v4, the parameter switch_id is mandatory if you have several switches. It should be the name of the switch you want to turn on. Optionally, you can reference a list of entities, a delta, choose to restore the states or set a random offset if you want to override the presence simulation switch configuration:

switch_id: switch.presence_simulation
entity_id:
  - group.outside_lights
  - light.living_room
  - light.hall
delta: 5
restore_states: True
random: 300

Stop the simulation

The service presence_simulation.stop will stop the simulation and set the switch.presence_simulation entity to off.

⚠️ From v4, the parameter switch_id is mandatory if you have several switches. It should be the name of the switch you want to turn off.

Toggle the simulation

The service presence_simulation.toggle will start or stop the simulation, depending on the current state of the switch entity.

⚠️ From v4, the parameter switch_id is mandatory if you have several switches. It should be the name of the switch you want to toggle.

Event

Each time the simulation calls a service (turn on a light, open a cover, ...), an event presence_simulation_change is fired. You can catch this event in an automation, to notify you for instance.

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