I have an Aqara FP3 presence sensor in my office, attached directly to HA (not through Aqara app). It is above my desk and my 3D printer is behind me by about 6 feet. That sensor turns on my desk light and monitors when I arrive, and off about 10 minutes after I leave (no presence).
Now the wrinkle: Sometimes the 3D printer provides “presence” when it’s running (the lights and monitors don’t go off) and sometimes it doesn’t (works as expected).
I asked ChatGPT for solutions and it offered 2 approaches combining a PIR sensor and the mmwave sensor. Both are rather complicated, flaky, and hard to debug. Worse, neither works very well, or at least not predictably well.
Has anyone tackled something like this? If so, what works for you? TIA
I’m not sure what your using but my aquara software allowed me to set up zones to block motion. (the ceiling fan in my office primarily) it was the fp2 not the 3 and been years. Had to run a process that checked whole motion was happening in the room. And created a mask that prevented that particular motion from tripping it… I literally wouldn’t use one of these in a room with constant motion if you couldn’t do that… And I live in Texas so the ceiling fan stays… I haven’t even thought about it in over a year… Is that not still a thing?
Yes, I previously had FP2 working with zones. But I wanted FP300 because it is wireless. Also, it has PIR+mmwave, so it is closer to “immediately on” when I entered the room. (the FP2 had a momentary up to 1-3 second delay).
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize before I bought this that the FP300 doesn’t expose zones except in Zigbee2MQTT and I am running ZHA with 60 devices, so I am unwilling to change and re-pair as everything is currently rock solid.
A contact sensor on the door - for fast triggering when someone enters.
PIR - since a lot of things that move don’t have an IR signature.
With a contact sensor (to fast trigger) you can also be more strategic about where presence or IR sensors cover - in an office environment you may only need to cover the desk since you will spend most of your presence there.
Yeah I thought that the mmWave sensors sounded pretty cool when they first came out. But then I very quickly realized that they could be problematic.
in a perfect world the precision and sensitivity sounds like the perfect solution to the “lights turned off on me sitting on the couch watching tv” problem.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. And then the sensitivity becomes a real problem.
we have cats, and fans, and windows and other potentially miniscule things that might slightly move. and then my lights stay on all day long…
Since I haven’t tried one maybe they aren’t as bad as I anticipate.
Prior to the FP2 I had PIR only. I was sitting in the dark and waving at it all too often. There is definitely a nice use case for mmWave, and it worked great until the 3D printer came along.
What would really solve this for me is for ZHA and FP300 to work properly together. Not sure why they don’t / can’t?
