Cheap Solar PIR Alarm Teardown and ESPHome

[5ur3n]

I’ve been tinkering with some randomly bought gadgets looking for something that is a good host for ESPhome based alarm tech. Ideally I want a reasonable weather-sealed case with a PV panel, reasonable battery and some sort of ESPHome compatible MCU. These are basically just going to be early deterrent devices not actually my alarm system. I found it odd that there are not many teardowns of this stuff online (because perhaps nobody with HA/ESP skills is dumb enough to buy one, but hey a guy’s gotta have hobbies).

Anyway… here goes:

Candidate 1:

Exterior & Case:

Verdict: Remotes seem locked to individual devices, case is definitely not IP65 as advertised on the box.

[5ur3n]

Internals: Inside there’s an 18650 battery and a board which seems way more complicated than I would have expected. What I assume to be the microcontroller has no visible labels, though there is a recognisable EEPROM chip on the board. The overall detection of this thing seems poor as well so between that and the non IP65 case I’m gonna send this one to the junk box and be done with it.