The first thing that is needed in order to greet by name is an understanding of WHO just arrived. For all you single people out there, you have it easy, unless you want to greet burglars by name as well. For the rest of us, we’ve most likely set up Device Trackers for those we care about. I’m not going to get into the configuration of that – I personally use a combination of GPS + nmap scans, but the important thing is to have them configured and working properly by the time you are reading this.

But how do we determine not just who is home, but who recently arrived? We take a look at 2 components of that device tracker state: That the person’s current location is home, and that the state changed to home within the past X minutes.

We could just use that logic within an automation itself – just have those 2 requirements sit as the condition portion. But this can become frustrating when you have multiple people to track and also should you be using this logic in multiple automations. So let’s move them to template binary sensors, and use an input number to make it easy to configure the number of minutes that we should consider someone recent from the front end, until we find that sweet spot: