Bed Presence for ESPHome

I have such a bed:

Couldn’t the module be fitted with an extension cable? It would be protected behind the mattress. I’m currently doing the same with electric floor mats and an Aqara humidity sensor. :smiley:

You still need to add in the “slat” to attach the sensors to, but that could definitely work. 3ft extensions is about as long as I’ve found readily available.

It might also work to simply use the 8" extensions provided and leave the main module “floating” between the box spring and mattress.

The idea of adding a woorden slat in my box spring bed is not very appealing
Pressure isn’t dependent on there being a slat or not so in theory it might work without
Has someone tried without slat on a box spring bed like the one from purple turtle?

People have tried with the DIY resistance sensor version. It did not work.

Thank you for the information. Do you think that this cable would also work? Also, it looks like you could extend it even further with another cable. I can definitely give it a try.

So, do I need anything else besides your bed sensor and the extension cables?

I don’t disagree. The sensor as designed is definitely for slat beds. You’re welcome to experiment, but box spring beds are not a supported setup, so you’re definitely in DIY/your own risk territory here.

As long as the setup provides a female socket on the board side, and a male pin on the sensor side, it should be fine.That cables looks to do that. As mentioned above, you’re in DIY/experimental territory here, so no guarantees (but I don’t see why that setup wouldn’t work).

Thank you for your helpful answers. I have now ordered everything once and will report whether it works.:+1:

My bed has “satellites” instead of slats. Do you think this will work? They are hard plastic but can bounce up and down individually.

I would not be confident it would work. There are potentially a couple challenges, but the biggest one in my mind is mounting 24 inch wide sensor strips across the satellites without damaging them when the satellites move. There’s also the question of if the satellites would provide enough pressure against the sensor strips.

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Makes sense. Too bad, thanks anyway!

Single sensors kits are now available for Twin/Full beds! These kits are identical, only ship with one sensor strip instead of two. This gives you the flexibility to plug the single sensor strip into either side of the module, or even upgrade to a dual sensor setup down the road.

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I was testing a FSR today, hoping to build a DIY version of one of these, and at one point, I lifted myself out of bed, my full bodyweight (about 70kg) pressing onto my hand for a moment. As luck would have it, my hand on the mattress was right above the resistor on its slat, and once that happened, my multimeter started giving wildly incongruous readings to what it was doing before.

That’s a problem for another thread, but I bring it up here because it causes me to wonder: what are the weight limits for the FSRs on your device, and would I need to worry that pushing down on the mattress just above the sensor might overload it?

Sound like to me you have a bad connection or solder joint…

My FSR goes up to 10MΩ. That gives one a huge range to work with.

What is the spec of your FSR and what is the value of your other resistor in the voltage divider/bridge?

The datasheet doesn’t explicitly mention a max pressure. It claims to saturate and not be able to measure anything above 150psi-200psi, but that is not when it would be physically damaged.

I went ahead and tossed a clamp on my test setup. That clamp claims to put around 600 lbs. of force when fully cranked down and it’s definitely not putting that force over an entire square inch. There was no damage to the sensor and it continued to report consistent values.

Add in a mattress on top spreading the load over the sensor, I don’t think anyone is going to be able to damage a sensor that is correctly mounted to a slat.

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Thanks for the very thorough response! That’s more than sufficient for me to feel confident.

When I’ve got just a little more wiggle room in my budget, I’m excited to grab one of your sensors!

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I have a completely flat baseboard for my mattress and I’ve just mounted it upside-down and used the extension wires provided (otherwise the FSR would bend a bit).

I’ll report back after some time with how it’s working out, but it seems good so far.

I would like to adopt this device into ESPHome so I can add my encryption key, add a status binary sensor and adjust the device name.

However I never see the adopt option in the ESPHome add-on dashboard. I do see it available to Add in Devices & Services but want to do the adopt and make the changes first.

Do I have to download the yaml file?

Is your HA server and IoT devices (ESPhome devices) on different VLAN’s? That’s my issue and the ESPhome Dashboard never displays newly added devices if they are brought in externally (ie: not created from YAML). I had that issue with a couple of Athom Presence sensors.

Nope. One flat network.

I just turned off “use ping for status” in the ESPHome add-on and it found it.