How long silence has to last before someone is assumed to have left. Do not make this small. A phone on a 5 GHz access point only shows up on 2.4 GHz when it sweeps for known networks — every few minutes as the screen wakes, not continuously. At 60 seconds everyone would flicker between home and away all evening. 900 is the sweet spot; shorten it only if you have confirmed the phones actually sit on 2.4 GHz.

A noise floor, applied as frames arrive. Anything fainter is treated as the corridor or the room next door and never enters the table at all. Less negative is stricter: −60 means “practically in the room”, −85 means “somewhere in the building”. Raise it if neighbours’ devices clutter Find devices; lower it if your own phone drops out from the far corner.

When you tap a name on the panel to correct a wrong reading, this is how long your correction holds before automatic detection resumes. Long enough to be useful, short enough that you never have to remember to undo it. Set it to 0 to let the sensor win immediately — which makes manual taps nearly pointless.

Which 2.4 GHz channels the ESP32 sweeps. The first one is special: it is also the rendezvous channel the door unit talks on, and where the room unit spends most of its time. 1, 6 and 11 are the only non-overlapping channels in the band, so this default covers it. Adding more just dilutes attention.

How long the ESP32 pauses on each non-rendezvous channel before moving on. Longer hears more per visit but leaves the door unit unanswered for longer; shorter may miss devices entirely. The door retries for about 1.3 seconds, so keep this comfortably under that.

This is the setting that resolves the radio conflict. One radio has two jobs: sniffing wants to hop channels, ESP-NOW needs both ends on the same one. So the room unit parks here most of each cycle and makes short excursions elsewhere. The dwell is not wasted — it sniffs this channel the whole time. Raise it if the door unit struggles to get through; lower it if devices on other channels are being missed.

This single number is the door unit’s entire battery life. Deep sleep costs about 0.12 mAh a day and a repaint 0.017 mAh — both negligible. Check-ins are ~0.005 mAh each and dominate everything. On a 2000 mAh cell: 15 s ≈ 71 days, 30 s ≈ 142 days, 60 s ≈ 284 days. It is also the worst case for how long the glass can be showing the wrong thing after you change the sign, which is what the next two settings are for.

Nothing here detects knocking. This triggers when you change what the door should display — switching Enforce Knock on or off from the panel. At that moment the glass is showing the wrong thing, and at a slow baseline it could stay wrong for a full interval. So the door catches up quickly for a short window, then relaxes. It fires just as much when you turn the sign off as when you turn it on.

How long that catch-up lasts before dropping back to the baseline. Two minutes covers changing your mind once or twice. Set it to 0 to disable catching up entirely, in which case a sign change waits for the next ordinary check-in.

Overnight nobody is reading the door, so there is no reason to spend battery keeping it current. At 15 minutes a night of check-ins costs about 0.5 mAh instead of 9 mAh at 15 seconds — over a term, most of a recharge saved during hours when the sign is doing nothing at all.

A fixed clock window. Times are the room’s own clock (Pacific), not the PC’s, so this behaves the same even if the PC’s timezone is wrong. A window crossing midnight is normal and handled.

Ties hibernation to the mode you already toggle on the panel, so a late night or an early one adjusts itself instead of fighting a fixed schedule. Because it is an explicit statement that nobody is reading the door, it beats the clock: with both enabled, Good Night hibernates the door at any hour.

Either toggle is enough — use one, both, or neither. With neither ticked the door always uses its normal interval. The Cadence box in the Door unit card below shows which rule is in force right now.

Changing the sign still wakes it promptly. The catch-up window above overrides hibernation, so turning Enforce Knock on at 2 am still reaches the door in seconds. Hibernation only governs the idle cadence, never a pending change.

The Find devices window normally cleans up after itself. This is for when it did not — the agent stopped mid-window, say. It never touches enrolled devices.

Starts enrolment over from nothing. Automatic presence stops for all three people until devices are claimed again, and everyone falls back to whatever was last set by hand. There is no undo.