Aqara Vibration Sensor tilt polling time or other Zigbee tilt sensor

Configuration Zigbee
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TL;DR Looking for a reliable zigbee tilt sensor or hack to reliably read tilt from Aqara vibration sensor

So, I’m on HA for a couple of years now. Running in docker, almost exclusively zigbee components via deCONZ. I’ve now run into a problem that’s got me stumped. I’m looking for a doorbell solution: we have an old house with an actual bell :bell: that’s rung by pulling on a knob outside. I love the old bell, but we can’t always hear it when we’re in the attic or in the back of the garden, so I’d like it to propagate to our phones.
The knob pulls on a rotating arm. I have had the Aqara vibration sensor attached to to the rotating arm for a while now, but my results are mixed at best. I get a lot of false alarms from other doors closing, sensitivity settings don’t seem to matter much. I’ve tried filtering on the vibrationstrength attribute, but this is very inconsistent. Then I found the tilt and orientation settings, which seemed like the perfect solution (it’s on a rotating arm after all!). Unfortunately the sensor doesn’t trigger on changes in orientation! I’ve added a template sensor that monitors the rotation, but it doesn’t update in the short time the knob is pulled. I tried triggering on vibration with changed rotation as a condition, but no love. It’s either triggering randomly (like when a truck drives by) or very unreliably when someone’s actually at the door.
I figured there would be a zigbee tilt sensor that triggers on changes in rotation, but after searching for the better part of a day I’m stuck… Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

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Are there enough accessible moving parts to attach the magnet of a door sensor to it? That would be very reliable and the aqara’s are pretty small.

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Thanks for the suggestion. This was the (433Mhz) setup I had before I moved to HA and zigbee and I was happy I could try something else. The setup is very accessible, but because everything is old there’s a lot of wiggle room in the parts, which makes the door sensor less then ideal. If this thread doesn’t spark I’ll get a door sensor and give that a go!

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Remember it doesn’t have to be a perfect open or close. Just one or more changes in the open/close state would suffice. So wiggeling in and out of range would do as well. The aquara’s respont withing quite a reasonable space, so varying the distance between magnet and sensor could also help.

1 Like
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Good to know, thanks.

It just seems silly to me, I have all the necessary info in the vibration sensor, but not I’m not able to make it work!