I’m looking for “something” which allows me to count humans inside a room. Sounds simple but I can’t find anything. I was thinking about using a PIR Motion Detector but once they triggered, it takes a while before they come back. I need something with knows that Person A moves from Room A into the next room and back…
I own a PI4 with OpenHABian with ZigBee and Homematic.
To refine your requirements -
Is there more than one route/exit?
Do you really care if it is person A that moves, or any person? e.g. individual identification.
Does this have to deal with dogs, children, vacuum cleaners, prams etc.?
What sort of response times do you need - know if “occupancy count” has changed within seconds, or minutes, or?
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MDAR
(Stuart Hanlon, UK importer of Velbus hardware)
5
For this to work, you need a beam that can determine which direction the person is moving in, or two beams spaced horizontally. Or if there are multiple entry points, you could make them one-way only. So you can come in through the door, but you have to leave through a window.
I know. As I don’t know the full details of the application I left the OP to do some thinking and research. The break beam type sensors are readily available and could be used in some kind of DIY implementation eg an array.
Here is an interesting article. The authors review various options and decide to use an array of IR detectors and a Pi0 These days that could have the added bonus of detecting someone with a fever
The grid-eye Panasonic ir sensor looks very interesting. There is even software to count people in a room. The sensors can be bought cheaply and there are raspberry pi examples of using them. The evaluation kit comes with bluetooth so you could avoid cables to connect to a pi or buy the sensor hat.
Hi,
actually, i only need to count. I need to know the number of people inside of a room. The calculation I do with my OpenHAB, but the HW I’m looking for need to be able to send an event if a Person/Dog/Cat/Baby whatsoever crosses the “HW-Point” which than will send an event which my OpenHAB receives.
The HW should be quite responsive, 2 Hue PIR Motion Sensors are too slow due to the 10 sec sleep in between of each trigger.
If you know a PIR sensor which does NOT sleep after a trigger, that might already do the trick for me.
You could try a Nvidia Jetson Nano to count people (and dogs).
It is a nice little and affordable platform for image recognition and object detection. It comes with a nice sdk that is quite usable (python, c++). All you need to do is feed it a videostream from the area you want to count people in. I started from here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/realtime-object-detection-10-lines-python-code-jetson-dustin-franklin
with all your ideas and suggestions, i found a rather cheap solution on the marked, called " Homematic IP Passage Sensor with Direction Recognition" which seems very promissing to what I need but still about 100$ each and I need up to 16 of those.
Is there any cheaper solution avialable? The idea from @m4rk (break beam type sensor) seems nice but can’t imagen putting it together.
@Max_G the “someting” is nice but not what I’m looking for.
At the end of the day, all I need is to know, if there is “someone in the room, yes or no”. That’s all. Nothing else, and the ability to connect that info with my OpenHAB