Does anybody have any experience with integrating this device with Home Assistant.
Mailbox Sensor
It uses the Smartlife/Tuya app. I have had some success in adding Tuya devices to HA using the LocalTuya integration so I’m wondering if this device might work.
No experience with that sensor and I’m “Tuya hater”, but the transmitter approach looks potentially good. Likely tilt switch powers the transmitter when lid is opened and sends low frequency signal. Close the lid and it’s unpowered.
Just wanted to chime in: also a Tuya ‘hater’ but if your WiFi is good enough for this you can try it.
Another option which might better: LoRa search results on the forum
I use Philips Hue motion sensor in mail box, works very well and signal is good. Many cheap sensor has signal issuevand will go offline very fast if lqi is low.
Just install a door sensor or general tilt sensor to the inside or outside (using a water resistant cover) of the mail box if its the same type as shown in the images for it.
I decided to go ahead and give one of these a try and return it if it wasn’t suitable.
It consists of a base station receiver that plugs into an outlet and a tilt sensor that goes in the mailbox. The base station connects to your home wifi and the sensor communicates with the base station using its own wireless signal.
The built in HA Tuya integration saw it as an unsupported device, but I was able to add the base station successfully using LocalTuya.
The integration creates one switch entity. This switch turns on when the tilt sensor is activated. Turning off the switch in HA resets the tilt detected (mail detected) condition ready for the next activation.
I added an automation to notify me when the switch changed from off to on (you have mail) and a button on my dashboard to turn the switch off (to turn if off when I’d checked the mail).
So far so good, however when I mounted the sensor in my mailbox which is about 100 feet from the nearest wall outlet where the base station was, I was not getting reliable notifications when the mailbox was opened. I tried various outlets to try and get as close as possible to the mailbox, even trying outside with a direct line of sight to the mailbox. I was only able to get notifications during my testing about 50% of the time, and never when the mail person actually delivered mail. My mailbox is a metal box mounted in a concrete/stucco pillar at the end of my driveway, so wireless conditions are pretty unfavorable.
Disappointingly I will be returning the device to Amazon and trying alternative methods as suggested in this post.