I have a hallway in my house, about 10m long. At one end there are about 5 steps down, two of the bedrooms are down the stairs.
I currently have a Xiaomi motion detector that is connected to HA and turns the hallway light on when motion is detected during the hours of darkness, so I can stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
The trouble is that it doesn’t do the full length of the hallway. My son (in the bedroom down the small stairway) doesn’t get detected.
Can anyone recommend a better range presence detector? Z-wave is not an option, zigbee or wifi is. I’d rather have false detection than missed detection.
A bonus if it is battery powered. Another bonus if it is cheap. And of course it must integrate with HA.
Doing this exact thing myself. I tried using an AM312 on a Wemos/Nodemcu at one end of the hallway as I my thought was to put a sonoff basic in the switch box with a button and the AM312 looking down the hallway since it was directly in the middle and perfect alignment. But the distance just didn’t work out. So plan B.
I rarely get an doorbell rings but I thought why not, so I prototyped on a breadboard my new concoction. At first it was just two reed switches next to each electromagnet for the front and back doorbells but I couldn’t let those GPIO pins go to waste. So I tested two AM312’s pointing down the hallway at each direction and it worked great. I threw in a RGB LED on the other pins for maybe some notifications of some sort but I might change it later for air quality sensor since there is a lot of air movement there.
I wrote all the code and got things working so far on the table, now I just need to figure out some decent mounts for the PIR sensors. I’d like to find me some little swivel with a screw to change the angle to hang from the doorbell case but not sure where I can find something small like that. Something kind of like you see on an outdoor floodlight that lets you swivel left and right and then adjust the angle up and down. I should be able to even detect the direction you walking down the hallway based on one coming on then going off and the other going on but not sure what I’ll do with that data yet.
Power options are pretty simple, it’s not far from my networking closet so I’ll just fish some shielded 18/3 wire I have laying around and snag 5vdc off of a power supply in my network cabinet, makes it easy and keeps it as a low voltage wall fish that is simple since it is only a couple feet down from the attic.