Tuya RB-SRAIN01 rain sensor distance problem

Hardware
1

I’ve got one of these Tuya rain sensors and the sensitivity and base operation is fine, but after testing I’ve determined that even 8m away from a router, it loses connection. I’m trying to work out my options before I open it up.

Even when it has a good connection, some reports are sporadic, like this time around it’s not including the battery level in the status reports although it did at one point. Also, I received the following report… “zh:controller:device: Device ‘0xa4c13862cb0a24c3’ is only compliant to revision ‘21’ of the ZigBee specification (current revision: 23).”

The sensor and panel appear good. It has a 3.7v battery inside according to pictures. I can’t find enough detail of the internals to work out where the aerial is because I’m wondering whether I can solve the distance aspect by improving the aerial … and live with the version age and reporting issues (I’m happy as long as I get the rain intensity) … or else whether the solar and battery can support another device like an ESP32 which will then talk on wifi.

My knowledge of ESP32 has so far been limited to blowing other people’s pre-compiled code onto chips. I do have some WROOM-32 units which I used in a project for the ZX81 - Michelle Knight's BBC Pages - but it was someone elses code.

Grateful for thoughts and opinions please.

2

OK - I’ve worked out a few bits that I didn’t know before.

By installing ESPHome for the ReSpeaker Lite, the HA on my Pi now has an environment where I can put in YAML configuration, and it will compile the code and generate a file for me… because my wifi credentials are already in there.

I’ve found this project - GitHub - hugokernel/esphome-rain-detector: ESPHome Rain Detector - which looks like it will work with the ESP32 boards I have.

That leaves the question of powering with the battery and whether the ESP32 will draw more than the solar can charge.