🪑 DIY Zigbee bed/chair occupancy sensor

I have made one of these. My cat is roughly 4kg and triggers it fine when lying on my chair. So might work for your use.

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Cat, kid, same, same :smiley:
Thanks!

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Glad to hear you are satisfied with the chair sensor :smiley: . For the IR receiver, I don’t think it’s possible to connect that to the Aqara sensor, but you could make something with an ESP8266 and ESPHome.

Hi @parrel
is the car seat sensor placed on a hard surface i.e. like wood in the chair? or can it be place in the cushion?

I have a chair similar to yours without a zipper and after ripping the fabric, there is some sort of wood which I need to remove I presume for it to work?

Well it has to go above the wood if that’s what you mean. My setup is:

Wood-fabric-sensor-leather

But depending on the thickness of the fabric this could also work:

Wood-sensor-fabric-leather

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Thanks.

So how did you manage to remove the wood? In my case it’s hard

I disassembled the chair so the seat and the backrest were separated and then I placed the sensor and reassembled the chair.

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Hi, what’s the best to way to place this for wooden chairs?
Like this one

Well you could cover it with a blanket/pillow. It’s not ideal but I don’t think there’s a better solution, other then installing pressure pads under the legs of the chair.

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I want to do that for my couch, so I need a wider range. Can I wonder various of this pressure pads to one sensor?

Yes you can. If you wire them in series, all of the pads have to be triggered to send the signal, and if you wire them parallel, only one of the pads has to be triggered to send a signal.

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Does that mean we could connect other pressure sensor like this one?

That’s a nice pressure strip! Yes that might work well! I’m going to try it for my bed.

By the way here is a cheaper option on Aliexpress (60cm long)

Nice, the pressure strip seems to be a good solution for couches. Do let us know how it’s working for you once you’ve got it, i just ordered one myself

Could you be more specific on how to wire multiple pressure strips/pads in parallel or series to single sensor, with some diagram perhaps

Will keep you updated here. Here are two simple diagrams haha.

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Thank you for your nice tutorial. Work’s perfekt to turn on my computer when sitting down on my chair!

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Hi @ferbulous can I use the pressure strip sensor like the ones you have used with the aqara door sensor for occupancy detection?

@parrel Any luck with your project? I have a chair sensor now and would love to use the same technique for a bed sensor.

Hi! I have one lying around but did not yet connect it to an Aqara sensor. But I’m pretty sure it works! Soon I will have time to connect it.

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@ferbulous @NoedelVreter

I tried it with the bed sensor I ordered from Aliexpress. However it’s too sensitive for the Aqara sensor. That causes it to open/close very often sometimes which causes the wrong last state being reported.

A better solution would be an ESP8266 or ESP32.

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