Aqara FP2 announcement at CES. Available globally, has zones, can detect multiple people and do different automations depending on where you are. For example if you lay down in your bed it can do a specific automation then another when you get out of bed. Still wondering if you can make it ignore areas that have movement like ceiling fans. That was the biggest issue for me with the FP1 except for not supporting zones.
With that said, those features are based on zones so I don’t know how that will work out when using it in Home Assistant but maybe someone can figure that out. Maybe emulate the Aqara app similar to the HomeKit emulation. Uses wifi, not Matter, at least when it comes.out as presence detectors are not in the first round of devices that support Matter but will be updated to support Matter whenever that happens. Works completely locally and is powered by USB C (not attached) so will allow for better placement. Here’s the link for top picks for the Apple Home announced devices at CES. Jump to the 13:49 minutes mark for the details. Maybe more details later as this video seems to be specific to devices announcement for Apple but I imagine the Aqara app works the same on Android so I don’t expect it will.
I’m really interested in ditching my Bluetooth based room detection (that uses Room Assistant) with some of these instead. Room Assistant is kind of flaky, and I’d rather track presence independent of any kind of tracker on each person (my cleaning person looked at me funny when I told here the little fob on the spare key would let the house respond to her as she moves from room to room).
I’m really hoping the zone option is something that is set inside the device (using the app) so that it can report that back to HA. Otherwise I guess the HA integration would have to have a way for you to define the grid.
Anybody have any thoughts about how this might deal with pet detection? I’d rather not have the house responding to the two cats wandering around if possible.
Just answering my own question after doing some more digging. Once you set the zones in the app, they are reported as separate sensors. Since it uses WiFi and has HomeKit compatibility, I’m betting (hoping) you can just use the HomeKit Controller integration in HA to use them. I was thinking about ordering from a Chinese place that is reported to ship internationally, but as I think about it, the app update (or new app if it needs a different update) may not be available in the US Apple AppStore yet, so I guess I’ll have to be patient. With six of these (five if I’m willing to accept some dead spots) I can have presence/room detection in the whole house.
Zones for the FP1 work natively with Zigbee2MQTT which was only released in China. Not sure about ZHA. I’m sure it will with the FP2, although it may be a while before it’s added. To Zigbee2MQTT. Now if it can do 3 person tracking I don’t no… Hopefully emulating the Aqara app using HomeKit HA integration will work out as that would be the best option. I’m wondering if you just set you location to China in the app would work or not. The options may be in the US app and just not show based on location set in the app.
Sounds like you need zones If you use ESPHome at all I use this is what I did. Gives you Bluetooth, PIR, and MmWave with a really good MmWave sensor. It does say the BT preference is kind of flaky but details are in the updates. Needs extremely basic soldiering skill. I didn’t need the BT presence so I left it out of the yaml. Much cheaper, moreso if you don’t need PIR. The PIR is for fast detection to say turn on lights then obviously MmWave for presence detection.
I own the FP1 and while great for long term presence detection, they aren’t good as as PIR for fast detection. Also having say, a ceiling fan on just low MmWave can cause false positives as they are very sensitive. I wish you could block out zones to ignore with the FP1 but I just don’t think MmWave can works that way.
That’s my understanding. And right now it’s really just wifi. The speculation is that the Bluetooth is there because it’s required for Matter onboarding, and Matter support is suppose to be coming to this later.
Yes. Aqara has stated they will add Matter to this device when this type of device is added to the supported Matter devices. Not sure when that will be as the first round is just lights, smart outlets, and other pretty basic devices. It’s just wifi at release. I don’t believe it has BT (it does seem below)
Right now based off just YouTube videos Matter is a mess, especially with a multi ecosystem system. One device will say, add to HomeKit but then if you try to add it to Alexa or Google Home or HA it either won’t pair with that second ecosystem or even have occasional dropouts or just quit working on the first ecosystem. I do not own any Matter devices so I can’t confirm this although HomeKit seemed to have the best support at the time those videos were published so I’ll be sticking to ZigBee and wifi for the time being personally until they get the initial issues resolved.
There was a video, can’t remember the URL where someone added all Matter compatible devices to HomeKit and while he did eventually get everything to work it took hours of trying.
Obviously Matter will get more stable over time but even HA documentation says Matter is Beta and is not recommended.
With that said they also added a feature in the March release where I believe if you add a Matter device to HomeKit and you emulate HomeKit in HA that Matter that it will just show up. I might be off on that so I would prefer to the March release notes to see the details of that added feature but it was something similar to that.
I’m unsure if there is any sort of timetable posted online about what devices are supposed to be added at what time and even if they did I’m sure that is always scheduled to change but it could be 6 months to a year before motion/presence tracking devices are added to the Matter standard and until they are, Aqara can’t change them from wifi to Matter which is why they were released as wifi with the proper hardware to do matter once they can.
Even when motion/presence detectors are added as supported devices Aqara has to roll out that firmware update so that’s going to vary from company to company and I expect PIR to be added before MmWave just because they are simpler in functionality. Not sure if Aqara will have to rewrite their current app to switch from wifi to Matter/Thread when that happens either so Matter support is coming to the FP2 but the timetable for that could be a while. Just and FYI.
EDIT: Poster above is correct, BT is required for the onboarding process
Matter is using Thread, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet for transport and Bluetooth LE for commissioning. All Matter devices based on Thread are required to feature Bluetooth LE concurrently to enable adding new devices to a network. Wi-Fi can be used for high bandwidth applications. It can be
I like that it has an ESP32 but it still seems like, at least based on this one review, that setting up everything like zones in the Aqara Home app and using the HomeKit Integration is the best option for now because the zones you create in the Aqara App are exposed as separate entities in Home Assistant and change state individually when a person is detected.
I’m sure someone will figure out to do all this in ESPHome at some point. Not sure the exact ESP32 in the FP2 but you can get the ESP32-C6 Devkit here which supports both ZigBee and Thread/Matter. Below is the description although since this is a Devkit I highly doubt it has this particular ESP32 chip in it. I also have no idea when MmWave smart devices will be added to Matter as they are rolling devices out in groups with the first devices being simple devices like lights and basic switches. Not sure what is all in the first wave and when they will even start the second wave of devices.
ESP32-C6-WROOM-1 is a general-purpose module supporting Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5, and IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee 3.0 and Thread). This module is built around the ESP32-C6 chip, and comes with a PCB antenna and a 8 MB SPI flash.
Aqara FP2 is available now at Amazon in the US store. Not sure about other regions though but it’s not cheap. Looks like it’s been available since March 9, 2023 and there are a few reviews there also.
Not sure how I missed this on my initial read but this is something MmWave sensors have desperately needed so I’m glad Aqara was able to finally be able to ignore things like ceiling fans.
In the app, navigate go Management Area and click New Other Areas. Here you can manually define Interference sources that would potentially trigger the sensor or use the automatic mode.
To setup this mode, you need to leave the room and toggle the moving fan. Trigger the Automatic Configuration within the app and it will identify the fan as an interference source, ignoring it in the future. This eliminates false positive triggers, which were a plague in the Aqara FP1.
Video review below that pointed out something that I didn’t think about. Since it uses WiFi and not ZigBee that’s why no hub is needed. If it worked via ZigBee an Aqara hub would be required or it would have had to be added to ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT so it’s actually good that it uses WiFi and not ZigBee IMO.
In a reddit post by the reviewer above they stated that they removed the Aqara app from their phone and everything still worked in Home Assistant but if they blocked internet access to the actual FP2 it would stop working in Home Assistant though so it is cloud dependent which is a shame. I’ll wait and see what can be done in ESPHome but I highly doubt all the functionality that the Aqara app has will be able to be added to ESPHome. I’m also not sure how that will work when a Matter update happens because LAN control is mandatory for Matter.
