I am very new to HA. I use Unifi equipment, and APs are all over my home for great coverage for Wi-Fi devices. I’m sorry, but I do not have any Zigbee or Zwave devices. All my devices are wifi in my HA and working with no issues with automation.
I use Aquara motion sensors, so I needed one Aquara hub to connect them. The hub shows up as “Matters” in my HA for the Aquara sensors.
I want a LUX light sensor like the Xiaomi Mi light Sensor that only detects light in an old YT video I just watched. When storms come, and it gets hard, I need it to detect the low LUX and turn on the hallway lights in my home. When it clears and the LUX is higher, I need it to turn them off.
Can you recommend a device that would work for me in HA? I am not using Zwave or Zigbee for my setup.
You do have a zigbee device - the Aqara hub supports it (M2 or M3?). Wifi tends to chew through batteries pretty quickly, so best avoided for this use case. The latest version Aqara motion sensors support Matter/Thread, although I’ve only got older Zigbee versions. Have a look at this article on the P2 light sensor.
I’m not going near this ‘When storms come, and it gets hard’…
However, if I read your post correctly, you are looking to detect outdoor light levels. While this device does not deliver ‘proper’ LX reading, I have found it to be very reliably and performant. I’ve mapped it’s output to LX by doing a compare to a real lumens meter. It is an outdoor device (however works fine inside too) , mains powered. If that works for you and you can place it where it gets good ‘view’ of sun changes it might be something to consider. As a plus, it works great for outdoor holiday lights , and to boot you get a ESPHome BLE ‘extender’.
Looking for something indoor. Thought I had something with @michaelblight with the Aqara P2 motion sensor I have one of those but there is an issue. The only Aqara Hub M2 I have it does not bring in illuminance into HA…been posted here I just found. Back on the hunt for another device
Does no one here make anything any longer? Is everyone now an appliance operator? The LUX sensor costs about $4 and can be interfaced to any ESP module.
With Home Assistant you never need to buy a hub. With the proper dongle, Home Assistant is the hub.
Yet.
You will discover that Home Assistant is organic, and you will eventually have Zigbee and Z-Wave in addition to WiFi.
Similar to other ambient sensors, temperature, humidity CO2, CO and more, it is very frustrating to have to ‘build’ a device for these reading. The chart below shows the comparison between a ‘bespoke’ Aqara light sensor and the ‘dumb but off the shelf’ Wyse sensor I referenced above. it’s (bad joke) night and day. I have wasted plenty of coin on ‘off the shelf’ quote un quote light sensors, only to be disappointed as I show in this representation of this Zigbee Aqara T1 (POC!). What a waste of USD 20 (and even buying from China direct vendor for that price). Look at the smooth curve of the Wyse ‘dumb’ analog light sensor, very smooth (aka representative of the cloud cover) and useful vs. the ‘maxed out’ and slow reading from the the Aqara device.
Both curves look useable. Unless you need accuracy in LUX units. But if all you need is to turn on the lights if the level drops below a threshold for a minute or more, well, I just wrote your automation for you.
I would look closely at and think about the length of the ‘stair steps’ on the zigbee sensor, IMHO the zigbee mantra of ‘battery life uber alles’ just does not make for good home automation experiences. And when I can have battery BLE sensors being as ‘tight’ as a mains powered WiFi sensor and still run for years between battery changes… well zigbee??? 15 minutes can be a pretty long amount of time for the ‘significant other’s’ opin of when something should happen in your automation
Yes, building is a fun part of this adventure for some of us. And this to my zigbee frustration is why I am so pleased to be able to now experiment with building battery powered ESP32 C and H devices with only using the Arduino tool chain, hopefully this will also spur the COTS devices developers in zigbee and thread to improve their performance.
