How might one go about adding “presence detection”? I’m not talking about home/away. I mean detecting when a person has walked up to the thermostat and turning the screen up without touching, so there’s one less thing to clean. Then when there’s nobody in front of the thermostat, turning the screen light entirely off. So that at night, it doesn’t light up the room.
I have a partner who is incredibly sensitive to light. If we don’t tape over all the leds on gfci outlets, he can’t sleep. If he sees the glow of the new thermostat under the bedroom door, it will not be appreciated.
Welcome to the club
These are 2 separate issues we are talking about. Regarding the brightness of the LCD, the hardware does not support out of the box dimming. There are a couple of threads on this forum with workarounds.
Regarding the presence (assuming you have control over brightness), there are a ton of motion and presence detection modules for pennies that use PIR or ultarsonic.
Here is two possible hardware: adafruit eBay
and one little tutorial to get you started if you are new: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/physical-computing/11
Make sure you use an available GPIO (the one used in this tutorial is fine)
Good luck and remember to report back your findings so that others don’t have to go through the same hurdles.
