BeeLight - Zigbee based environment sensor for Home Assistant

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1

Hi everyone,

I want to share one of my latest projects with you.

Why?

The idea behind this sensor is the lack of gas measurements in the Aquara Zigbee sensors and no good light measurement sensor for Zigbee. Currently, I “use” an integrated light sensor in my door switch, but this sensor is very unreliable. So I decided to combine these sensors and add gas measurement stuff on top.

Technical features

  • Cutting-edge MCU with an nRF54L with Zephyr
  • Powered by a single coin cell
  • Can measure
    • Temperature
    • Humidity
    • Pressure
    • IAQ
    • CO2 equivalent
    • VOC equivalent
    • Light intensity
    • Battery voltage
  • Small housing (40x42 mm)
  • Very basic electronic → Can be assembled by hand very easily
  • Zigbee2MQTT compatibility
  • Completely open source

Demo

Because the sensor is compatible with Zigbee2MQTT, it can be added to Home Assistant very easily

Zigbee2MQTT
Zigbee2MQTT1344×909 62.7 KB

HomeAssistant
HomeAssistant1255×912 75.3 KB

You can use all of these values for your automation. For example, using the VOC and IAQ values to remind you to open a window.

What´s planned next?

  • The calculation of the light value is not implemented yet
  • Current measurement is open
  • Long-running test
  • Zigbee OTA
  • Maybe sell it on Tindie (not sure about it now)

Feel free to ask questions or discuss the sensor. Maybe it´s also interesting for you :slight_smile:

2

Excellent.

One thing, on GitHub the image of the PCB seems to be missing.

3

Hi @nickrout,

yeah because the CI/CD pipeline for the KiCad project is buggy at the point where the image is added to the repository. I will fix it later :slight_smile:

4

This is not worth including. It’s just meaningless traffic on the network.

It is an estimate of CO2 assuming all the VOCs in the air are due to human breath. Which is rarely if ever the case. It won’t give any meaningful data.

If you want to include CO2 then you will need to include an actual CO2 sensor. e.g. Sensirion SCD4X or Senseair S8 LP.

Looks like this could cause the sensors to suffer from self heating. Have you made any measurements to that effect?