Our daily routines are rarely fixed. The way we interact with our smart homes changes from day to day. Using Home Assistant, my smart home has learned my routines without the aid of AI or cloud services.
What Presence Simulation does
Learning your habits from your usage history
Presence Simulation is a custom component for Home Assistant. It pulls data from Home Assistant’s history database over a set number of days, which must be shorter than the period retained by Recorder. The default retention period is 10 days.
Presence Simulation supports entities including lights, covers, and media players, as well as any other entities that can be set to on or off. If you can turn an entity on with homeassistant.turn_on or turn it off with homeassistant.turn_off, then you should be able to use that entity with Presence Simulation.
You can install Presence Simulation by searching for it in HACS and selecting the appropriate result when it comes up. Once installed, you can configure it by choosing the entities you want to use with Presence Simulation and the delta value, which is how many days back it will pull data from. There are also optional settings, such as whether to restore entities to their previous states after simulation and a brightness level to use for supported entities.
- Dimensions (exterior)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 Ounces
Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.
Presence Simulation can recreate your behavior when you’re away
Your house acts like someone is at home
The purpose of Presence Simulation is not hard to guess, given the name. It’s intended as a way to make it look like someone is living in your home when you’re away. By running Presence Simulation when you’re on vacation, for example, you can make your lights turn on and off or your blinds open and close so that it appears as if your home is being lived in.
The beauty of Presence Simulation is that, because it uses the real data from your smart home, you’re not in a situation where your lights all turn on at exactly the same time every night, and all turn off at the same time. That kind of rigid schedule makes it more obvious that you’re using automation, but with Presence Simulation, your smart home will act in a much more organic way, since it’s simply repeating exactly how you used it.
Why Presence Simulation is different from other options
You don’t need to create anything
You don’t need to use Presence Simulation to make your lights turn on and off when you’re away from home. You can create your own automations that will control various devices in your smart home when you’re away to make it look like you’re still home.
What makes Presence Simulation different is that you don’t need to manually program when your lights will turn on and when they’ll turn off again. With a large number of entities in your smart home, it can be a thankless task setting up an automation to control them all in a realistic manner.
With Presence Simulation, all you need to do is use your smart home as you normally do. The custom integration will then repeat the actions you took in your smart home a set number of days ago, as determined by your delta value. If you use a delta value of 7, for example, your lights will turn on at the same time as you turned them on last week, your blinds will close at the same time as last week, and so on.
This means you can add a large number of entities to Presence Simulation, all of which can change state at different times, which would take a long time to set up manually. It means you can create a highly convincing recreation of someone interacting with your smart home without having to spend hours setting it up.
All your data stays local
No AI and no cloud services required
One of the best parts of using Presence Simulation is that since it uses the history from your Home Assistant server, everything happens entirely locally. No data needs to leave your home, and nothing ends up on third-party servers.
There’s also no AI involved at any stage. While you could use AI to simulate presence in your home, Presence Simulation doesn’t use AI at all, and the results can feel more realistic because they’re based on your real-life interactions.
Hooking Home Assistant up to an AI service can produce some impressive results, but sharing information about your smart home with third-party services isn’t entirely compatible with the privacy-focused principles of Home Assistant. Presence Simulation gives you great results without having to sacrifice privacy.
The best integrations are often the simplest
Presence Simulation is based on a straightforward idea: a convincing way to simulate your presence at home is to replay your real interactions. While the idea is simple, the results can be really impressive.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
