Over the weekend I’ve build a small wall mount for the RCWL-0516 microwave motion sensor. The sensing angle can be adjusted by 90º in one direction. The RCWL-0516 is a cheap and small microwave based presence detector that can be attached via an ESP and ESPHome to Home Assistant. The RCWL-0516 can be configured like a normal PIR-Sensor but has ‘James Bond’ abilities - it can see through things that are transparent to microwave-length waves.
The case is consisting of 3 parts can be 3D printed, screwed together with 4 M3 screws and the wiring layed - voila! your own little motion detector for ~ 7EUR / $ / CHF for all material. Testing it at home over the weekend it works great until now.
Have you found the RCWL-0516 to be reliable. I did some testing a couple of years ago with an ESP8266 and kept getting lots of false positives, others were saying similar things. I tried suggestions like capacitors and resistors but none fixed it for me. I have had the same with certain PIRs as well. I’m not sure if it’s interference from the ESP8266, probably works fine on a regular Arduino. I never tried with an ESP32.
If you’ve found a reliable way for them to work maybe I can dust off the box with them in.
To my suprise: Yes. Until now it works flawless (for about 2 weeks now). I’ve installed it above the door to enter the laundry-room and the reaction time is very good. Every now and then I issue some lags, up to 3 steps walking into the laundry-room, but I strongly assume, that these are home assistant lags. I’m not sure if INPUT_PULLUP helped but I can report that at least this version works fine. When testing, I found the sensor to be a bit slow. But I figured, that this was just because of the way I’ve tested (by waving the hand like an idiot in front of the sensor). But once I tested for real (by walking and moving therefore larger bodyparts) it started to work fine.
I will build more of these sensors and would report here in case other sensors start to show problems.
I came across Microwave motion detection and seems promising if you have obstacles in a room that you want to see thru. Since these can see thru walls I was wondering if I built one for one room it would it detect motion in another adjacent room?
I have two rooms on my lower level that are separated by a wall down the middle. Would these microwave sensors get tripped if someone walked into the room without the motion needing detection?
