Back story:
I’ve been trying to add reliable motion sensors to my house, and haven’t had much luck with the Z-Wave sensors I bought. The only fast, reliable, and seemingly very battery efficient sensor has been the one Hue motion sensor I added. The sensors need to be battery powered, as I don’t have the option of running wire. Any other sensor suggestions are welcome.
I bought a handful of the Monoprice Z-Wave multisensors, but have found them really slow to react to motion events (anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds). This gets annoying since they are used as triggers to turn on lights when you walk in to a room (the WAF is very low on this, I hear about it constantly…). The battery life also seems to be dropping fairly quickly (even with reducing the wake up timer to once per day). I’m ready to remove them and find something else.
Question:
I’ve had good luck with the Philips Hue motion sensors, and am thinking of replacing all of the Z-Wave motion sensors with Hue. Since the current integration with Philips Hue motion sensors requires polling the Hue hub rest API to pull the sensor values, I’m concerned that adding another 6 or so motion sensors might overwhelm the Hue hub API if I’m polling 3 different values for every sensor (motion, temperature, and light).
I poll the motion sensor once every second for my current Hue sensor (temp and light are less aggressive) to ensure the lights come on as soon as someone walks in the room. If I poll 7 motion sensors every second, will this adversely affect the Hue hub? Has anyone done this?
Has anyone paired Hue motion sensors directly to a Zigbee USB stick? Is that another option?
Are there other motion sensors that are a better option?
If you use a RaspBee or Conbee USB stick and the deCONZ software to pair your ZigBee devices (deCONZ integrated in HA as of 0.61) you get local push instead of polling as with the Hue bridge. My motion triggered automations are very fast in this method with the Hue motion sensor!
I’m going to have to try this. I’ve paired the Hue sensors directly with my SmartThings hub, but even then it’s not great. Are there any gotchas to be aware of doing it this way?
If you are using the SmartThings bridge to Home Assistant, then no, it stays local. If you use the native lighting automation app in SmartThings, that also runs local on the hub, but it is so basic it really limits the automations you can build. If you make complex automations using webcore, then yes it has to go to the internet for processing, which causes delay.
I guess this brings up one potential gotcha - are you using HASS.io or a regular install on the Pi (could include a Docker install)? The Conbee/RaspBee hardware is controlled by a piece of software called deCONZ which needs to run as a daemon on the Pi also (the hardware talks to deCONZ, and deCONZ talks to HA). There is a deCONZ addon for HASS.io but I’m not sure how well it works at the moment. If you are using a HA install on Raspbian then no problem, you just install deCONZ on the Pi directly.
If you’re using Raspbian, you’d want to set up udev rules to make sure your USB sticks got the same device name on each boot, but that’s about the only concern there.
As an aside, an added bonus of deCONZ is that you can pair all kinds of ZigBee hardware to it (switches, lights, sensors, including Xiaomi) which really expands your options outside of the Hue ecosystem and the small amount of third party hardware the bridge supports.
As I say it does seem like people are using the addon and that it works OK, I’m just not sure it’s totally stable yet. It would be totally stable if you had it on its own Pi or other computer system, however.
Yes, I can see that from the thread. A lot of great support, which is always wonderful. Clearly folks want to break out from the Hue ecosystem for more control into their HA systems. I think it’s great!
I’m considering going the hass.io over Ubuntu route. I would have to migrate my current environment and have to figure that out.
I have a Pi3 with hass.io and it works, but I also have a fairly powerful laptop just kicking around that I can play with and it has plenty of USB ports
My concern with doing anything more with the Pi3 is it will result in risking performance. I could be wrong though.
At one point my Pi3 was running HA, deCONZ, Homebridge, Mosca MQTT, Appdaemon, and Nodered. And it was all working just fine - I was booting from USB however, which I think really does make a difference (certainly to lifetime of an install, I didn’t have corruption issues, and also to the speed of the system).
Question for clarification about how Hue products or any products work that have a hub - I’m still learning and as I’m testing more, it makes sense.
Even though HASS can see all Hue gear, it does it via the Hue hub, right?
So when a Hue motion senses motion, does the motion report it to the Hub and then HASS sees the activity and does whatever it’s told to do?
How does HASS get this information so quickly, if the Hue hub in theory doesn’t talk to HASS, but HASS polls the Hue Hub? Is that correct?
So when you bypass the Hue hub and pair a Hue motion sensor with the Conbee USB stick via deCONZ, HASS now told about the motion and capable to respond as instant as the Hue hub is.
