Re: [misterhouse-users] Occupancy/Presence clean-slate on restart

[Jason S. <ja...@sh...>]

There are two "open-loop" conditions that exist physically in most 
installations that I am unable to overcome.

- There is no 100% guarantee that a motion sensor will always report back 
when someone passes through a room.  Hawkeyes have a 15 second potential 
blind spot and some of the wired PIR's I have used dont always see 
someone at times.  This happens quite a bit more so with the more rooms 
you have in the system. (Happens all the time in a 12-bedroom house I have 
installed a system in).   I just stack up PIR's in rooms hoping to catch a 
glimpse of someone somehow.  (however see below)

- Two or more people could be walking (hand-in-hand) between rooms, thus 
not getting an accurate count of how many people left a room, etc..

The reason that I disabled the individual room count and made the 
reset global is to "re-sync" everything on occasion as it can / will get 
messed up over time.  If you can reasonably be assured the two examples 
above will not occur in your system then it may be worth while to not 
bother having the doors reset the system and include them as 
presence sensors into the OM instead.

If you do use doors are "sensors" into the OM (I do  not), then when a 
door opens, it will clear out the presence in the adjacent room.

With a global reset though, as I originally coded it, it will fall back on 
the regular motion-delay time, until the computer realizes someone is in 
the room again.   In a year of using this approach I have never had a 
light go out on me while in a room.  However, it will take the motion 
delay time long to turn it off upon leaving a room, something that I 
believe Kirk is trying to improve.

----

(sorta based on the following parallel problem)

The OM minimum count is 100% accurate all the time (it is impossible for 
it not to be, unless you have ghosts), however, I can never be assured of 
the maximum count due to those aforementioned limitations.  

To get close to 100% max count you would definitely need to supplement 
the  information with some form of AI having access to movement patterns, 
TOD, events, holidays, etc.. (I do some of this at home with C++)   But 
when all is said in done you will never achieve 100% of max thus you will 
need some sort of global "reset" eventually.

---

Im sure there is room for improvement, it just goes beyond my capacity to 
code it.  In the end, the lighting system currently works great and have 
not had any complaints from my customers or my Wife. ;)

-J






On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Steve Switzer wrote:

> Jason,
>    Would it be possible to reset only the connected room(s), when a door 
> is opened/closed? Would this be a better approach?
> 
> Steve
> 
> Jason Sharpee wrote:
> 
> >All I have is:
> >
> >if ($Startup) {
> >$Occupancy_Monitor->set('reset');
> >}
> >
> >The routine is smart about handling sudden appearances of people in rooms 
> >and deals with it accordingly.   In addition I have all of my outside 
> >doors fire a 'reset' state to the om object.  (If someone opens an 
> >outside door then we really have no idea if they left / someone else came 
> >in / etc.)
> >  
> >
> 
> 
> 
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