room presence detection has been a long standing challenge in the smart home / home assistant community. it's cool to see home assistant used and adapted for this use case.
Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
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Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#72Back in the man.ac.uk of the early 90s, there were no cameras or YOLO models but we still wanted to know when machines (especially the colour ones! LUXURY!) were available.
We just had "`rlogin` to every machine in the lab, run `who`, and collate the output". IIRC there was an early version written by 'flup that I extended with a tidier output (including an X11 window), auto-refreshing, and easier machine selection (eg. you could select rooms by name with regex filtering.)
Good times.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#73Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#74If you’re okay using Cloudflare tunnels, just use Tailscale to create a VPN instead.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#75Another solution in the age of portable electronic devices: detect presence based on active DHCP leases. You can let then people register themselves by MAC on some web portal so they can be visible by name if they're comfortable with that.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#76Point the camera at the door, use the camera to detect if the door is open.
Mount the camera on the door facing down and watch for a moving floor
That's a clever solution that would use less processing power. A camera pointed at the door provides the benefit of being useful for other purposes e.g. person detection / recognition and standard security camera purposes.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#77Another solution in the age of portable electronic devices: detect presence based on active DHCP leases. You can let then people register themselves by MAC on some web portal so they can be visible by name if they're comfortable with that.
Or Bluetooth. There are some problems (like MAC randomization) to get a real tracking with BLE, but to have a rough estimation, it's a good technique.
And you can do it with just an ESP32.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#78This would be a nightmare to implement from a legal standpoint in Europe.
Even if you collected aggregated data and not storing any PII or images?
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#79When I was in the CS department at NMSU, the Computer Science building was open to the public 24-hours a day. I suppose that's not commonly the case nowadays.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mount the camera on the door facing down and watch for a moving floor
That's a clever solution that would use less processing power. A camera pointed at the door provides the benefit of being useful for other purposes e.g. person detection / recognition and standard security camera purposes.
Until someone accuses you of looking down their shirt anyway.