Help with Magnetic Door Sensor for multiple drawers

I have a 4 drawer all plastic cabinet that I want to alert me when one of my children opens any of the drawers. The drawers stack vertically. I’m currently using one zigbee open/close door sensor on one drawer which works great. But now I would like to detect the open of all 4 doors. I don’t really want to use 4 open/close door sensors on all the drawers so am looking for ideas.

I was thinking of a way to utilize just the one zigbee part of the sensor with a long magnetic piece that could be run along the entire height of the 4 drawers but can’t figure how to rig it to work with one or more drawers opening and closing. If anyone has any suggestions on this I would love to hear about it.

My only other thought would be to just use a vibration sensor which I’m not sure how well it would work and also I don’t currently own one.

Thank in advance!

A light beam trigger is probably the easiest.
But that means you need to build it yourself with Tasmota/ESPHome.

Or you can mount a momentary pushbutton behind each drawer.

Interesting ideas. I’ll have to research both those solutions as I’ve never used them before but that gives me some possible options. Thank you for your suggestions.

If it fits I suggest the pushbuttons.
You could either chain them all together and have “any drawer opened” as a status or if you put each button to a specific pin then you can have the status “first drawer open”.

I would have done the second option since it’s not much difference in wiring it up.

You could use a water or door sensor (either one that accepts a probe or solder it) and rig something that would break the continuity when one of the drawer opens. Then if using a water sensor reverse the open/close in the settings or using binary_sensor. That is probably the most reliable method.

If you want to hack it, this is likely as easy as running conductive tape down the inside back, with breaks at each drawer. Then attach something conductive that will complete the circuit when the drawer is closed.

Or for a more finished solution use drawer switches to either break or open the continuity depending on how you wire it.

Wired door/window sensors would also work:

1 Like

You wouldn’t happen to be able to link to some example guides utilizing your pushbutton solution would you? I haven’t messed around with Tasmota/ESPHome yet so it’s a bit new to me. Thanks!

This should be it.

If you now put all pushbuttons in series from 3.3 volt to com and connect NO to the next pushbuttons com, and so on.
Then in to the pin of the ESP.
That means as long as all drawers is closed the pushbuttons should close and the pin should be “high”.

Thanks Hellis81. I’ll take a look at the link you provided. I appreciate the information.

If you are prepared to open up the zigbee sensor you can simply wire in some reed switches (wire them in series)

Yeah I’d have thought the easiest way would be simply bypass the reed switch in the current sensor you are using and extend it to 4x reed switches wired in series (one to each drawer).
Then when all drawers are closed all reeds are contacting and the circuit is complete.
Any drawer opens and the circuit breaks so the sensor will trigger