mike2872

Something similar can also be done in Home Assistant with tommysense and espectre if you are interested.

You can also try out tommysense

Founder of TOMMY here. I'm glad you like the ESPHome support. It was one of the most requested features before implementation.

Regarding the lifetime license for Discord members, that's primarily to ensure that beta testers aren't being "used" for testing and then asked to pay. A lot of my users had stories about that with previous companies, and I wanted to give a promise that wasn't going to be the case here. And building a community where people help each other with device placement, hardware suggestions, etc. is a nice addition.

Anyway, I think this project is really cool, francescopace. Many have asked for TOMMY to be open-sourced, so that's definitely something you're going to have success with. I wish you all the best!

- Mike

I can understand that. I used to do a lot of game streaming with Parsec and ended up with a similar setup.

Right now, TOMMY only use Wi-Fi and doesn't support using ethernet for the communication with HA and Wi-Fi for peer-to-peer communication. But that is very possible to implement. Just haven't encountered the use case before now.

I'll probably implement an option for split communication (ethernet, wifi) and then allow users to decide the Wi-Fi channel devices communicate on peer-to-peer. That way you'd have full control over possible interference.

It's possible to have the devices in-wall, but it might not be that practical as you point out. Or at least they would have to be taken out once for flashing, then OTA updates would reduce or eliminate the need for reflashing further.

The real benefit from the sensors working through walls in my opinion is to be able to hide the devices away (e.g. in a closet or drawer) + being able to create zones that crosses walls. Image wanting a zone called 'upstairs', 'downstairs', 'garage' etc. which consists of multiple rooms divided by walls. Instead of having a sensor in each room you might just need one on each side of the total area.

Thanks! I agree with the PiR and mmWave limitations. Right now I think this project can replace motion sensor. Hopefully mmWave when stationary presence detection is added (planned Q1 2026).

Thanks! I'm glad you like it.

Sounds like a great project. Using the Wi-Fi signal directly might work in your case. It would be nice to go back to actually using the bedroom as a place to sleep and not look at the phones all the time :-)

I'm connecting them to a 10000 mAh powerbank which lasts 2-3 days I think. But I think it's pretty specific to the board you have.

Actually, you are right. I confused myself. You would need to have them connected to the same Wi-Fi as that determines the bands and channels they communicate on even though the communication is peer-to-peer.

How are your devices connected exactly? Using ethernet on the subnet your HA instance is on? And are you then able to also connect to a separate Wi-Fi SSID you create for those devices?

Also, are you able to join the Discord channel? Then we can create a thread and go a bit more into depth about your setup.

Unfortunately not. Even though the concept is the same, Philips Hue uses Zigbee as the sensing protocol which isn't compatible with the Wi-Fi sensing TOMMY uses.

You actually won't need to configure a SSID at all. The peer-to-peer communication is handled by the devices internally without any manual setup.

Yes, if I understand you correctly then it already works with that setup.

So you can have the ESP32s over ethernet and it still works as long as it's on the same network as TOMMY (Home Assistant Add-on or Docker). Only thing to keep in mind is that the ESP32s need to have Wi-Fi inbuilt with antenna (either PCB or external).

Thanks, I'm glad you like it! Let me know how it works for you. And if you need any help, feel free to reach out.

A zone is 2 or more devices. So 2 works just fine. Instead of a straight line, image two flashlights pointing at each other. The beam of the flashlight becomes the sensing area.

In the dashboard you can create zones which you put devices into. So you could flash a handful of devices and put them into a "living room" or "upstairs" zone.

Yes that would work. They don't need to be connected to the router on Wi-Fi, it can be ethernet too. The ESP's will connect with each other peer-to-peer.