When I saw this device I knew I had to try it out. Primarily because in some cases you can have issues using Aeotec’s Door/Window Sensor 6 with metal doors. I do have one on a metal door and I have not seen it so much in Home Assistant but in Vera it would occasionally lose communication with the hub. I could go wake up the sensor and it would be fine until the nxt time. It was not terribly frequent and not a huge hassle but the sensor was just a matter of 12’ or so from the hub.
I occurred to me, then, that the GE sensor may be a better solution to such a situation as it’s not attached to the door, in the same manner, rather, it is mounted on the door’s hinge pin. A novel idea if you ask me. It may not be for everyone, but it is an alternative. So I put my order in for one to test it out.
With that, let’s take a look and see what it looks like.
First, the box:
Now the sensor itself:
The device will work with either left or right-hand doors. My understanding, also, is that it is supposed to be OTA updateable. I have not been able to confirm that, however.
It is kind of an elegant looking device and while it won’t be completely unnoticeable, it will fit in. It also comes in different styles also.
I decided that instead of pairing the device directly with my Aeotec Z-Stick I would pair it within Home Assistant. I initiated the ZWave Add Node from within Home Assistant and it gave the indication it had paired almost instantly.
Those were the only two items that showed up. I have paired enough devices to know that such a device should have some kind of binary sensor entity. However, the above two items were the only ones that showed up. I have had this issue before in Home Assistant, where devices pair, but it’s like it stops at that and does not finish the configuration. I was going to have to restart Home Assistant anyway to reload my configuration to have the device show up on the front end, so I went ahead and shut it down so I could start up the Open ZWave Control Panel.
When that was all started and going I could see why not everything had not showed up:
This is the primary reason I just go through the process of pairing directly with the Z-Stick. This has happened many times. In fact, even after I shut down OZWCP and restart Home Assistant, I still have to restart it one more time to get all the entities to show up.
At any rate, I let OZWCP go through its process to poll the device and get the configuration information.
So everything seems to be configured and set up and shows up as it should. Unfortunately, this is where the fun ended. Not really in a bad way, but I would not be able to progress to a full installation.
I restarted Home Assistant and had my view set up so I could see the various entities. My plan, once I had a better grasp of the other entities involved other than the binary sensor, was to leave it in the group with the other door in my living room. However, I discovered that the binary sensor was not reporting correctly.
The ‘Back Door’ listed in the group is monitored by an Aeotec Door sensor. Everything below that is the GE sensor. As you can see, it shows a status of on and an access control of 23. I am not sure what the access control is supposed to mean, but it does change with the open and close of the sensor.
As you can see, it is sending information back, but the binary sensor, the one I really want to work, is not reporting correctly. I pressed the ‘Action Button’ to borrow the term from Aeotec and it did change the binary sensor status to that it was in at the time I woke it up:
However, activating the sensor just did not change the state of the binary sensor at all. I went back into OZWCP to see if I could get a grasp on what was going on. One of the things I noticed is that there is no way to keep the device awake (at least that I have found) more than a very brief second. As such, I was unable to change its reporting status from notification to even Basic Set.
I thought, you know what, I am going to call tech support and see if they can shed any light on this. You end up calling Jasco who makes the device. And while I had a small delay in getting through (wait time) I did get through to a live person. He took all my information, details about my set up ( I think I confused them a little when I told them my home automation was not on a hub per se, but running on a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant). The guy didn’t throw his hands up or anything, he asked about my set up, the number of nodes I have and so on. He told me he was sending the information over to the engineering team and would call me back when he had a response from them. The call never came. Though, I will hold out, for now, that they need some time to diagnose the issue.
Basically what it came down to was that I would not install this on the hinge since it was not fully functional. But I did go through the process of setting it up for the door. The instructions in the manual seem a bit convoluted to me. I think they could be written a little better, but the gist of it is you are just flipping the gear mechanism and the lever arm around depending on whether the door opens from the left or right. There is a small but long winded screw that holds everything up top, together.
If it is not apparent now, the teeth on the arm are pretty fine. Not that it is a concern, rather I point it out because you can really fine tune the point in which the sensor is activated. The direction your door opens will determine the set up (obviously) and it is marked on the gear itself:
If your door opens to the right, then the end marked RIGHT will be upward, and if it opens to the left, then the end marked LEFT will be facing upward.
The lever arm is marked with an ‘L’ on one side which should be facing up for a left opening door, the other side, however, does not have a corresponding ‘R’, but I figure if they point out one side for you, you should be able to deduce what the other side is for.
There are alignment ‘dots’ on each side of the lever that are supposed to line up with the gear mechanism:
The idea being, that when you line up those dots, the arm should be in the right spot for operation. I did not find that to be the case. You will also notice that the gear portion has a section that is recessed. Those raised and recessed areas are what ‘trip’ the sensor by pushing down on a pin or letting it pop up
The device is powered by a CR2 battery and I want to say that the information I saw stated around a 1-year life. I have some thoughts on this. Not about the battery life, but the design of it in the device. First, that is a big enough battery that I suspect they could have made it USB rechargeable, but then again, that is an added cost to manufacturing. However, you can buy CR2 rechargeable batteries all day long. The battery that it came with has a capacity of 750mAh. I know you can get them at 1000mAh and perhaps even higher. Quite frankly, I am okay with that option too. Being attached to a hinge, unless they designed it to be specifically so, its not a quick task of unmounting it for recharging, unlike the Aeotec Door/Window sensor.
I wish I could have worked out the issue with the binary sensor. I did try setting the configuration parameter from within Home Assistant but it just would not take. So I am hoping Jasco will call me back and have a solution, or perhaps tell me I got a bum sensor and need a new one. At any rate, once I am able to get it working and mounted I will follow up with that.
