Has anyone tried getitng the kangaroo motion sensor to work with HA

It looks like the sensor is $7 right now and there is a 50% off applied at checkout.

$3.50 might be the cheapest motion sensor i’ve seen! So I have to ask, has anyone been able to use these with HA?

Figure anything out on this? $3.50 for a motion sensor was too good to pass up. I have two that have come in. I’m happy to rip one of these apart if that will help.

Edit: I’ll do one better. If you are interested in getting one of these working with HA, I’ll mail you one for free. Apparently it’s a ESP32-S0WD chip.

1 Like

any updates on the sensors?

Nope. It may be a dead-end (i.e. the board is not flashable) or more likely just a case where not enough of the right/smart people got tricked into buying these cheap sensors.

Thanks, worth a shot.

Any recommendations on motion sensors with HA that are pet friendly and more affordable :wink:

Based off this it seems it would be using a HC-SR501 motion PIR sensor

I also have 2 of these sensors would love to flash them

Wait if it’s just an esp32 then we just need to flash it. Have you guys jumped on esphome discord and tried at all ? I love the idea these are cheap and disposable almost. I’ll grab a few when I finish my current project (1-2 more months ) and try to solder leads to flash it. Plenty of YouTube videos for how to flash with soldering terminals or using a jig to old the terminals to the chip

I cannot claim any expertise here but this version of the ESP32 was deemed unflashable in earlier discussions. That said, I don’t know that anyone has tried. See the link to the discussion above from Reddit. A Kangaroo rep even jumped in.

Note: The chip in the Kangaroo is mentioned in the Tasmota ESP32 specs: Features - Tasmota

Ok. Did a little sleuthing:

Here are photos from the FCC registry. This gives me some hope.

https://fccid.io/2APSE-MOTION1/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-3903605

I could find nothing on the Sputnik PIR board for the sensor. There are, however, a number of labeled pads as well as some unlabeled holes for header pins.

see we are otw we can doo iit lol

1 Like

Under the law that “Nothing is easy,” the board has changed since its FCC approval. (We are now on “MOTION2” rather than “MOTION1.”) We no longer have any holes for pins and nothing is labeled on the board.

Good news: It would seem that the layout of the pads is the same as on the labeled MOTION1 version (i.e. they’re all in the same locations). As such we can assume the labels on MOTION1 are still our guide.
Bad news: I’m not the person with the skills/experience to solder this up and figure this out.

These are the photos of the board I just took:


Here’s the labeled MOTION1 for comparison:

1 Like

Things I think I know:

  1. We have RX and TX ready to go at the top of the board going straight to the ESP32 SOWD chip. Great.
  2. There are a couple of GND pads.

Things I don’t know:

  1. What the heck is the second chip? I found nothing.
  2. It appears that the reset button traces to the second chip rather than the ESP32. Does that mean it’s a no-go for holding this down like a GPIO0 to put the board into a flash mode?
  3. For voltage we have 3V, and “2V3.” Again, both may trace to the second chip first. There is also the VD SDIO pad, which per the ESP32 specs is Pin 26, works as the power supply for the related IO, and also for an external device. Obviously the ESP32 is always 3.3v from our serial adapters so none of this may matter to us.
1 Like

nice on the v1 labels! thats perfect! i think the next option would be to try to connect the solder leads. They might have the flashing button tied to the other chip to try and prevent it from being flashed. might need to scratch some off to solder to ground, and fake a switch as it were

None of the images are very high quality, so I can’t tell for sure, but that could be an SPI flash chip for storing data like the program. If it is, then it’s possible (failing all else) that you might be able to program an esp32/8266 developer board and move the flash chip over. I think I’ve seen enough to go get one myself. I’ll post back here if I have any success