Is it worth paying the premium for zigbee/z-wave devices which from my partial research shows have lower range than RF devices.
Also want to try out if motion sensors will work for me in home automation or not before investing heavily. Motion sensors must be present in <1% of my country’s houses.
Any input is highly appreciated.
Personally I rely heavily on motion to set lights (I NEVER touch a light switch)
I went the wired way. This way I know my setup will not be affected by interference or low battery.
It also means it’s cheap as chips as a sensor costs like £1 for a HC-SR501 or for an HC-SR505
I used recycled CAT5 cables to wire them to a Raspberry Pi (the first version)
I actually use 2 in most of my rooms for even better reliability (so lights don’t turn off while at dinner or while working on the PC, when I don’t move “much”). To do this I wire them in an OR logical gate so I only need to use 2 GPIOs per room.
RF will definitely have the best range (Compared to Z-Wave & ZigBee), in my experience. However RF Motion sensors seem to always be larger then the other ones. I use 2 of these RF ones, which are the smallest RF one’s I could find at a good price point, and they work great. I’m using the Sonoff RF Bridge to read them.
I also have 6 of these Zigbee ones. It would not be possible to over emphasize how small they are. I love that I can set one on a bookshelf or counter top and they just blend in because they are so tiny. However the range is not that great, at least with the CC2531 zigbee stick I’m using. If you are already invested in (or going to be) ZigBee devices, you should have a few plug-in devices to act as routers to extend the range of your network though, so it becomes less of an issue.
Thanks a lot for the reply!
Wow, kind of what I was looking for. Would love to know more on how you are doing this?
Thanks a lot for the reply!
That’s what I have been trying to figure out. Other than size are the Zigbee ones worth almost double the price?
I mean is there a difference in latency, reset times, response times between these?
Also how do you look for which ones trigger immediately, have very low reset times.
Keep reading how some of the PIR sensors take quite some time to reset to detect new motion.
Latency on both is pretty short, the RF might be faster, but is probably more down to the devices programming then the network protocol.
As for response and reset time, the ZigBee one’s I would consider more of an “occupancy” sensor then motion. They trigger quick enough, but don’t send the “false” signal for ~30 seconds after no motion. For turning lights on and off they work great, most applications you are going to want to trigger immediately and not untrigger (turn the lights off) until a few minutes of no motion anyway (with a seperate timer) since you don’t want to be sitting reading a book without moving and keep having the lights turn off.
As for the price, I think their worth $10 simply due to the design, I would pay that for an RF one of the same size and shape too. Here’s a comparison.
A simple python script that monitors the GPIO ports where the PIRS are connected to and then communicates with HA via mqtt
Hey, have ventured into making my own sensors as well. But my sensors are plagued with the “false/ghost switching thing”
How did you tackle that? Especially with the long cables you might be needing to set this up?
I am using PIR AM312 which supposedly should decrease interference with ESP8266 nodemcu and ESP8266 Sonoff Basics.
It seems like I see random false triggers every 3rd/4th day maybe. When it works, it works flawlessly, when there’s a problem, it triggers like crazy.