MQTT Presence Sensor always On

[anthonyb82]

Hi there! First and foremost, thank you for all the work to breathe life back in to these devices! Having a ton of fun messing around with it!

I set up MQTT through Immortal. I see it fine in Home Assistant and can toggle screen on/off etc. I can not seem to use the presence sensor to tun off the screen and back on when presence is detected again. When I listen through MQTT, the portal continuously publishes the presence state as On. If I click the privacy button on top of the portal to disable the cam and mic, it'll then show presence as off. I am trying to use this to trigger a screen off/on automation based on presence. Is there potentially a setting I am overlooking somewhere that uses the mic as part of the presence detection?

I had previously installed portal HA-Bridge and that was able to trigger the appropriate presence states, but it defeats my purpose since it launches to that app upon wake.

Appreciate any help if this is on my end! Thank you again.

[starbrightlab]

Thanks for the kind words — and no, you're not overlooking a setting. What you're seeing is a real limitation of how Immortal's presence sensor works, and your mic theory is close but not quite it.

How the sensor actually works: an unprivileged app can't read the Portal's camera-based presence signal directly (it's behind a platform-signature permission). Immortal instead infers presence from the system's dream/sleep lifecycle, which the OS derives from that signal: screensaver starts → someone's around; device sleeps at a screen timeout → room emptied. The privacy shutter flips your sensor OFF because it disables the OS presence service entirely, so the device sleeps — it's the screen going dark you're seeing, not the mic.

Why yours reads ON constantly: in the default Always-on frame mode the screen is pinned and never times out, so the "room emptied" transition can never happen — presence has nothing to observe and falls back to "is the screen on," which is always yes. The MQTT entity actually tells you this: check the confident attribute on the presence sensor in HA — it'll be false in your setup, meaning "this reading is a guess."

What to try: Settings → Screensaver → Power → switch Always on to Follow presence. Then the screen sleeps when the room empties and re-wakes on presence — which both fixes the sensor and mostly removes the need for your automation, since the device is then doing presence-driven screen off/on natively.

Two follow-ups that would help us improve this:

1. Which Portal model is it (Gen-1 / Gen-2 / Portal+ / Go)? Presence-mode behaviour on mains-powered models is the least-verified path.
2. If you try Follow presence, does the presence topic start transitioning ON/OFF as expected?

Separately, we're considering publishing the entity as unavailable (instead of a misleading ON) whenever confident=false — feedback welcome on whether that would work for your automations.

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