Velostat bed sensor

[AntonH]

If anyone wants to DIY this sensor, you can do that by cutting 2 strips of aluminium foil tape. Laying them paralel to each other, with a small gap between them and then taping some velostat across them.

Very easy to do and reduced the price of the sensor from ±20-30 $/€ to less then 1 $/€.
I’ll post a tutorial if requested.

[tom_l]

I had a play around with velostat ages ago. I never ended up using it though as I had yet to discover the drift issues with strain gauges and was happy using that instead. I used duct tape and some copper tape I had left over from another project:

Bed occupancy DIY sensor

I finally got windowed averaging working on the ESP. I had to drop monitoring the status and wifi of my sensor though. Hopefully this will will be rectified with an ESPhome update. So now I have this, a perfect bed occupancy sensor for less than $15 AUD that is easy to install (no messing about with load cells under bed legs). [image] When I first tested the filtered sensor I was surprised to see a much bigger difference in signal for in and out of bed. However when I went to bed there was a…

[cyn]

Could you post a picture? Thanks

[AntonH]

Check out @tom_l ’s post above. I came to pretty much the exact same solution.