Recently, my Brother, who has just started throwing some cash into the smart home money pit, brought me some new devices to try. He said it’s mmWave presence sensor, but after a bit of tinkering, I’ve had some bad news for him…
The said sensor is probably this little poor thing from Aliexpress. It’s Tuya again and I have no idea from which offer did he get it to claim they are presence sensor, but they are not. It seems they are old fasioned PIR/Radar motion sensors, despite what has been written on the box. They work on double AAA batteries and they probably last forever. They are supposedly supported by Z2M extension, but it is possible to run them with ZHA with a bit of effort.
Initially, I’ve had some issues setting them up, just like my Brother. But that’s been caused by thinking it’s actually a human presence sensor. I’ve had somewhat high hopes, especially my Wife is constantly complaining about kids not turning the lights off in the bathroom.
Unfortunately, after some research, I’ve managed to make it work with Zigbee Home Assistant custom quirk. In fact, I’ve had to give up on the “presence detecting” idea and try to set it up as an old fashioned motion sensor. I might be wrong and there hasn’t been anyone yet to actually create a proper quirk for it, but it’s not likely.
Got them finally working with this quirk from GitHub and as a motion sensor they work fine. I’ve configured it to turn off the light in the bathroom when there is no motion, but you can imagine it does not work that well and turns off the lights when you stop moving. Just like those annoying sensors in public bathrooms.
It does the job of turning the lights off and my Wife has stopped complaining, but now the kids are mad because it goes dark during the “business” hours…
So, unless you need a simple motion sensor to turn on and off the lights when needed – this is cheap and quite easy to configure. For my setup and purposes, I’d really like to replace it with a proper mmWave human presence sensor with some more features…
In short, it looks like a classic case of false advertising to sell some old, unwanted stock for cheap, just to get rid of it.
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