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1. Does it have any idea of the range at which motion is happening, relative to the distance between nodes or otherwise?
2. Can it correlate motion with that of another WiFi or Bluetooth device? So if I'm carrying my phone and it can see me moving, can it tell that it's me?
3. What's the movement -> signal latency?
Could you help me understand the use case for this? I've used PIR and mmWave before. When would you choose tommysense vs some other option.
You can create zones spanning multiple rooms without sensors in each room. Instead of traditional room-by-room motion detection, you could divide your house into zones like "upstairs", "downstairs", or "living area". Especially useful for controlling heating by floor or area-level lighting.
Working through walls also means less clutter. You can hide devices in drawers, closets, or anywhere out of sight.
There's also a pricing aspect: ESP32s can be acquired for a couple of dollars each, so you could have motion sensing throughout your whole house for a fraction of the price of dedicated sensors in every room.
This is impressive and some of the "coming soon" features are ambitious. So, these devices mesh with each other. Are they like "idle" WiFi connections, or are they chatty? I'm wondering how much spectrum clashing there will be. WiFi can be finicky enough as-is.
What dark magic is this! Very cool repurposing of technology. If you don't mind me asking - what's the origin of the name Tommy?
Honestly, it doesn't stand for anything! A couple years ago I was playing around with the concept and a song came on that mentioned "Tommy" repeatedly. I jokingly started calling it Tommy when talking to my girlfriend about it.
So every time the lights turned on or off it was "Tommy who did it" and the name just stuck. Now I'm too invested to change it.
There's a dedicated thread on the Discord channel where people are coming up with good ideas for what TOMMY stands for. Some of the suggestions are "Totally Overengineered Motion Monitoring" and "Through-Obstacle Motion Monitoring". People are still working on what the Y should stand for.
Without having the time right now to dig too deep, I have a few questions: 1. Does it have any idea of the range at which motion is happening, relative to the distance between nodes or otherwise? 2. Can it correlate motion with that of another WiFi or Bluetooth device? So if I'm carrying my phone and it can see me moving, can it tell that it's me? 3. What's the movement -> signal latency?
1. As of now it only knows whether there is motion in the zone or not. Actual (x,y) coordinates within the zone are theoretically possible and something I have on the roadmap for 2026.
2. No, it doesn't correlate with other devices currently. But Wi-Fi sensing can theoretically identify who is moving by analyzing how you disrupt the signal. We all have unique movement patterns. I actually have a working proof of concept that can differentiate between me and my girlfriend, but it's very experimental and not stable enough for release yet. Definitely on the future roadmap though.
3. Pretty much instant (around 50ms). The detection happens in real-time as the signal disruption is analyzed.
What dark magic is this! Very cool repurposing of technology. If you don't mind me asking - what's the origin of the name Tommy?
Thanks! Glad you like it. Honestly, it doesn't stand for anything! A couple years ago I was playing around with the concept and a song came on that mentioned "Tommy" repeatedly. I jokingly started calling it Tommy when talking to my girlfriend about it. So every time the lights turned on or off it was "Tommy who did it" and the name just stuck. Now I'm too invested to change it. There's a dedicated thread on the Disc…
What dark magic is this! Very cool repurposing of technology. If you don't mind me asking - what's the origin of the name Tommy?
Thanks! Glad you like it. Honestly, it doesn't stand for anything! A couple years ago I was playing around with the concept and a song came on that mentioned "Tommy" repeatedly. I jokingly started calling it Tommy when talking to my girlfriend about it. So every time the lights turned on or off it was "Tommy who did it" and the name just stuck. Now I'm too invested to change it. There's a dedicated thread on the Disc…
Any reason it couldn't run on Raspberry Pi? Also, I have some ZHA sensors that I believe are also on 2.4GHz band - will this interfere with them?
The interference from running TOMMY is quite low. And if ESP32-C6 (2.4Ghz Wi-Fi 6) or ESP32-C5 (5Ghz) is used as sensors, the interference is negligible.
> No hub required - TOMMY runs as a Home Assistant add-on or on a Linux host (Docker) and uses supporting devices to create a sensing network. I don't see how either the HA instance or the Linux host can't be viewed as a hub. No hub required feels untrue to me. I assume this question is intended to clarify that some additional device is not necessary, but I think this could be reworded.
You're absolutely right. Thanks for the feedback! "No hub required" is misleading. What I meant was "no additional proprietary hub". Meaning, if you're already running Home Assistant or have a Linux machine, you don't need to own a separate device like Zigbee/Z-Wave hub. But yes, the HA instance or Linux host is effectively acting as the hub. I'll update that wording on the site.