I like my Aqara WSDCGQ11LM Zigbee sensors because they transmit based on data value changes rather than time but they don’t have a display. I also have the Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC temperature and humidity sensors with E-Ink display but I haven’t been able to get them to work reliably with ESP32 boards running Tasmota not to mention that getting BLE everywhere in the house is way more difficult than Zigbee.
So has anyone found humidity/temperature Zigbee sensors with E-Ink display that they like? There are some in the Z2M supported devices list but no reviews to speak of.
From my experience, I’ve not found any zigbee based temp and humidity sensor to be very good for ‘near real time’ home automation. I have moved to bluetooth low energy products and have been vey happy with 15 or so of them around the house, in fridges, freezers, outside, attic. You might want to have a look at the numerous threads here around BLE sensors. This is my work that continues to run very reliably for 2 years, you might find some of the data at the bottom interesting. Low cost, reliable, long battery life and sensor reading intervals that are useful.
I only had time for a quick look but it is very interesting. Are you placing several Raspberry Pi’s around your house to act as collector/forwarders? Are you backhauling advertisements over wired Ethernet since shared BLE/WiFi radios are reported to contribute to missed transmissions?
A router company has just announced a BLE to MQTT gateway based on ES32 in a nice industrial design (my wife hates my ESP32 boards sticking out of USB power blocks around the house and I tell her it is experimental!) but their software is an untested entity.
I’m using these, but I use deCONZ and not Z2M, so cannot comment on that aspect. I also assume they’re LCD, not e-ink. They take 2 AAA batteries. They don’t appear to update that often, but they may be a bit out of range (I waiting on delivery of more zigbee lights as repeaters).
I have just one old ‘Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2’ in HVAC closet connected via ethernet, has been working nonstop for near 2 years. A number of other folks are using other devices as BLE ‘hubs/collectors’, ESP32 seems pretty popular. that said, my little rpi is plugging along just fine. The key thing is make sure whatever hub and BLE sensors you select have proven interface/decoding and are easy to connect. While no local display, the Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC-ATC devices with the easy custom firmware at at price of under USD 5 each are a really winners as a remote device. For fridge and freezer, I recommend a sensor with AA or AAA batteries rather than coin cells.
IMHO, you want a sensor that is reporting temperature and humidity at about once per minute, regardless of whether the temp or humidity values change or not. This seems best to drive home automations. Zigbee, while good for some applications, emphasis battery life over sensor readings. My BLE devices run 2 + years on AA, AAA or CRxxxx batteries and report at least 60 time an hour.
I have a few Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC-ATC devices already that I could use to test your solution but only have a Pi Zero W. Would that work since it has Bluetooth or would I need to buy a more modern Pi? I will still have the WiFi/Bluetooth interference problem but it is to quickly test things out.
Regularly timed samples of data are definitely better if the batteries don’t run down too quickly The Zigbee Aqara’s have been in place for almost a year and the battery level is reported at 86%
P.S.: One potential advantage with ESP32 over Pi is that you can get versions with external antennae though mine has a printed antenna on the PCB. And I should try a recent version of Tasmota since I’m running something that is 6 months old.
A Pi Zero W should be plenty of horsepower for this use. If you can follow the steps make an image like mine and get the program compiled, and have a MQTT server running, you should be able to evaluate the sensors performance pretty quickly.
In theory, the Aqara sensors should be good, however like others, my experience with reliability is pretty random and poor. I farted around with them for months, but never have gotten them to be reliable. And even those that report, look at my charts, they don’t hold up vs. the BLE devices.
I can not speak to the use of a ESP32 as a ‘hub’, I’ve wanted to experiment with it for this application. But my Raspberry Pi just chugs along, and as a result, I’ve not found a reason go down the path of a ESP32 as a hub. I think others are successful there, so do look at HA forums for folks working with this. Additionally, I think folks are successful with just having a BLE adapter on their Home Assistant server with the proper addon.
A lot of your success depends on the wireless ‘noise’ / hub location for BLE I think. I’ve been pretty luck, and even though I am not in a apartment/condo environment with lots of competing wireless, I think I have a considerable amount of ‘stuff’ in the 2.4 GHz range and yet my BLE, WiFi and Zigbee stuff seems to play nice with each other.
Oh crap, my fail here. I have no security on my MQTT server. And as a result, you and others that have tried to use my code with their broker with security have hit a wall. My apologies! Have a look a these forks, I know at least one of them fixed the login problem. And I am sure all of them are an improvement of my poor coding.
Sorry for the pedantry, but to avoid confusion, the LYWSD03MMC uses plain LCD, those are not e-ink.
There is an actual e-ink temp/humidity/lux zigbee sensor, but nobody managed tomake it work properly with neither Z2M nor ZHA afaik
Maybe unusable for use in a thermostat because in that application you would need regular updates.
It seems that this device only updates if the temperature (and/or humidity) has changed by a certain amount - therefore the update intervals can be long.
In that graph, shortest interval was 2 min, longest was 4h 18m.
I dusted off my ESP32 board and flashed the most recent version of Tasmota32-Bluetooth. I also loaded the Blerry BLE-to-MQTT scripts that support the ATC sensor (and some others). It has an interesting way of implementing redundancy by letting more than one ESP32 report on the same MQTT topic by using whitelists of the sensors.
I am collecting data with the Aqara and the Xiaomi sensors side by side in my bathroom to learn about reporting intervals and the like.
P.S.: I’d forgotten that the ESP32’s have flash-on-board though I have no idea whether their write endurance is better than your typical microSD card
The Zigbee Aqara’s have been in place for almost a year and the battery level is reported at 86%
