Thinking of getting a bunch of these new PoE presence and motion sensors from Apollo Automation.
I know that are now partnered with Home Assistant, but the product is new, and it’s not cheap. My goal is to get a PoE switch and to run these over ethernet to try to reduce the number of battery-operated motion sensors. Also, these things look great in the ceiling, and I have access to just about every room.
But it’s a big expense. Hoping to get some feedback as to how easily they installed, configured, detect, post-purchase service etc.
Hey neighbor… I can’t speak to the R PRO-1 but I do have a few of the MTR-1 units which also use the LD2450 sensors and they are great. Set up is easy and HA picked them up immediately.
A word of caution for the ceiling mount option though is that they have a sensor angle of 60o. So if you have 8 foot ceilings the footprint on the floor is approx. 9ish feet (check my math), the edge of which will only catch your feet. These are best set up in a corner where they can capture the whole room.
I have one R-PRO-1, but it’s not the PoE version. For reference, I also have some Apollo MSR-1s and MSR-2s.
I found the LD2450 in the R-PRO-1 to be unsuitable for presence detection. Presence often stayed detected even after everyone had left the room.
I added the LD2412 and found that to be quite good for presence detection. I like it better than the LD2410 in the MSRs because it has more distance gates with less distance between them, making it easier to tune for my environment. My room is fairly small with a ceiling fan in the center, so it is a challenge to get sensors tuned correctly to ignore the fan but still trigger on presence.
As for Apollo, I haven’t had to interact with them much, but they have quite an active Discord server and it seems employees are on there answering questions. I do love that all their firmware is in GitHub, so I can fork and tweak it as I want.
I’ve had them for about a week now. I have some initial comments. I should mention I use ceiling mount on the R Pro-1 and power and data over ethernet. I bought it because of the ethernet so I could wire cleanly through my ceilings.
In terms of support, it’s basically “read the documentation” or “here’s a picture”. They assume you haven’t read it and don’t seem interested in taking you seriously. Not impressed.
In terms of product design and build quality, I think it’s pretty good if you are relying on wifi. Not so good on ethernet if you have a ceiling mount. Their proprietary module sits un-aided in the plastic ceiling mount, sitting on the bottom only held in by the plastic cover which it sits on and that holds pretty securely at the bottom of the mount. But with ethernet, it’s almost impossible to get the module to sit straight. The weight of the cable, even if it’s directly above, twists and rotates the module sideways. Part of the problem is that you have to really manhandle the think to get it in the hole due to the two springs and tight fit. So even if you have the ethernet cable perfectly dangling right over the jack, it’s very very hard to get the module level. And you can’t really check the orientation because if you take the bottom cover out, nothing supports the module and it falls through, supported by the cable.
I also had big big trouble using the HLK Radar tool which is their preferred method for setting up your 2450 zones. I’m using the latest version of the HLK tool, I have a modern android phone, my bluetooth never has a problem. I’ve got bluetooth turned on the 2450 chip, And while it finds it during the scan, it is so laggy and slow and even closes up at times that it’s impossible to work with, even for one zone which was my use case. Maybe their bluetooth antenna is terrible. I don’t know.
