v1.0.0

Changelog

All notable changes to this project are documented here.
This project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

1.0.0 - 2026-08-10

First public release.

A Windows service that turns "someone is actually using this PC" into a room occupancy signal in
Home Assistant, published over plain MQTT discovery. No custom integration, no HACS, no config flow —
install the MSI, point it at your broker, and the device and its entities appear automatically.

Added

Room occupancy, not device tracking

• Per-person binary_sensor entities with device_class: occupancy, plus room, screen-locked and
  idle-time sensors, and device-level active-user, at-home and network-location diagnostics.
• device_tracker is deliberately not used. Its state space is home / not_home / GPS zone, so it
  cannot express "in the office", and an MQTT tracker is a connection tracker — it would outrank
  your phone's GPS in the Person integration and pin you home whenever a PC was unlocked.

Session sensing that works from a service

• Reads WTSQuerySessionInformationW(..., WTSSessionInfoEx) for last input, lock state and account
  across every session. The service runs in session 0, where GetLastInputInfo only ever reports
  session 0's own input and is therefore useless.
• A session counts only when it is Active (a disconnected RDP session keeps running with nobody in
  front of it), unlocked, and has had input within the idle threshold.
• Handles fast user switching, multiple concurrent sessions, and RDP.
• Subscribes to real session and power notifications rather than polling alone, by replacing the
  default WindowsServiceLifetime with one that opts into session-change and power events.

Location gating for laptops

• A desktop in use is in its room by definition; a laptop might be in a café. For laptops, occupancy
  additionally requires proof the machine is physically at home.
• Three strategies, combinable with Any or All: Wi-Fi BSSID/SSID, default-gateway MAC, and
  dock/monitor device ID. VPN, tunnel and hypervisor adapters are excluded so a tunnel cannot fake
  "home".
• Windows.Devices.Geolocation is not used: it needs interactive per-user consent that cannot be
  granted from session 0, and its accuracy is 100 m–5 km — useless for room-level presence.
• Strategies that cannot form an opinion return indeterminate and are excluded from the vote rather
  than counting as "away".

Debouncing for the things that actually break presence

• Resume from sleep holds the previous location for a settle window, because Wi-Fi re-associates
  several seconds after wake and would otherwise publish a false "away" on every resume.
• Roaming between access points is absorbed: becoming home applies immediately, leaving home only
  after a sustained grace period.
• Brief locks and idle blips are smoothed by an activity grace period.

Multi-device rooms

• Map different Windows accounts on different machines (DESKTOP-PC\stephen, CORP\sflowers) to one
  shared personKey.
• Every reading carries a last_active attribute so Home Assistant can break ties when the same
  person is reported by more than one machine. The README includes a Group helper and template sensor
  recipe for combining them.

MQTT

• One retained device-discovery message per machine with dev, o and cmps, using the ~ base
  topic. Entities are declared from configuration, so the set is stable and there is no entity churn.
• Last-will offline, explicit offline before suspend, and automatic reconnect.
• Republishes discovery when Home Assistant sends its birth message, after a short random delay so a
  house full of agents does not stampede the broker.
• Optional TLS with CA and client certificates.

Setup and packaging

• WiX MSI: installs and starts the service as LocalSystem, configures restart-on-failure, and ACLs
  C:\ProgramData\HAActiveUser to SYSTEM and Administrators.
• Uninstall clears the retained discovery topic, so no orphaned device or entities are left behind in
  Home Assistant.
• CLI helpers: --set-password (DPAPI, machine-scoped), --list-accounts, --list-devices and
  --remove-from-ha.
• Warns at startup when a laptop requires the location gate but no identifiers are configured — the
  one configuration mistake that would silently leave occupancy permanently off.

Privacy

• Only accounts listed in Accounts are tracked; everyone else is ignored entirely.
• Raw BSSIDs and gateway MACs are not published unless PublishRawIdentifiers is enabled. The
  network-location sensor publishes home / away / unknown instead, because the Home Assistant
  recorder retains attribute history indefinitely.
• No latitude, longitude or GPS accuracy is ever published.

Known limitations

• Windows 10/11 and Server 2016+ on x64. The WTS_SESSIONSTATE_LOCK flag is inverted on Windows 7
  and Server 2008 R2; that inversion is handled, but those versions are untested.
• suggested_area is a creation-time hint only. Moving a device between areas afterwards must be
  done in the Home Assistant UI.
• One room per machine. Per-BSSID room mapping is not exposed yet, though the detector already
  resolves a room name rather than a boolean so it is a configuration change rather than a redesign.
• WTSINFOEX.LastInputTime can be zero on some session types; idle time is published as 0 in that
  case.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/stephenmann/HA-ActiveUserForWindows/commits/v1.0.0