I was looking for a Zigbee device that would give me some level of information that the Mail-person had accessed my mailboxes. I found this USD less than 7 Aqara/Xiaomi sensor and have been very pleased with it’s performance in this task with Home Assistant. The ‘significant other’ enjoys the ‘You’ve Got Mail’ voice announcement throughout the houses . And I like the notification on my watch letting me know I have some new electronics toys delivered by my personal 747 from AliExpress
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In the course of setting this up, I found that this device is a useful low cost tool to test both zigbee router stickiness and battery powered end device range. I fully realize that each device has unique properties in these realms. However, having this device, which I am fairly confident of it’s performance with a couple different routers and ‘walls/distance’ give me a good base to work with when setting up other devices.
Just remove it, hard reset it and ‘add via’ the router you want it to communicate via. With this, you can gauge device placement. This has been useful. This devices performance is night and day better than a number of other Aqara/Xiaomi devices that I have tried in the past.
When in stasis it wakes up and reports once every 40 minutes or so, very reliable. No way I have found to adjust this wake up period, which is pretty normal for battery powered zigbee end devices. You can setup a logging mechanism and let it sit for a long period of time to get a gauge of zigbee mesh stability in an area. And/or you can put it in an area you suspect of interference or poor signal and use the vibration trigger to help validate and repair these problems.
You can test it’s random wake up and communication on vibration by tapping on the device. At least in Zigbee2MQTT, you can adjust the sensitivity of the vibration reaction. I found that crows landing on one of the mailboxes triggered it
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As a bonus, it has a temperature sensor, not that the world cares what the temperature is in my mailbox. Again, only reports in about once an hour.
Vibration Sensor