My Wemo motion sensor is suddenly not operating reliably. Updating to the latest version of home assistant v 0.111.4 has not resolved the problem. The issue is that the ON state of the binary sensor is now being set intermittently this is despite the integration pywemo.subscribe reliably seeing the motion event. You can see in the logs below, between approx 17:15 and 17:17 there were 7 motion events detected by pywemo, but, only one of the events at 17:15 caused the binary sensory to change to ON. In fact there were a dozen or so events between 17:15 and the next time the binary sensor turned on (17:24). During each motion event the home assistant debug logs report a subscription update of the binary sensor but that doesn’t seem to register as an actual home assistant event and consequently doesn’t trigger a required automation. I’m now confused and don’t know where else to look. Can anybody help?
My Wemo motion sensors have been dicky in HA for the last few weeks, and I more pinned it on what Wemo are doing with pushing the need for a cloud account; they say they were removing local access and allowing cloud only.
When I check the Wemo app on my phone, despite moving in front of the sensor and seeing the LED turning on, it would not register in HA or in the Wemo app.
The only way to get it to show would be to move in from of the sensor for > 5 seconds and then it would show up on both. Way to insensitive for practical use. I factory reset both of them and it did not improve.
Since it was doing it in the app and in HA, I gave up and bought some cheap zigbee motion sensors. My plan has always been to get away from the Wemo gear as its so old now, it has a lot of Wifi compatibility issues for me on newer APs (they were the only devices still using 11g mode, everything else was on 11n).
Yeah they are a bit old now. Nevertheless, it’s been reliable for a long time and I appreciate the small size of the sensor and the fact that it is not battery powered. The sensor sits on top of the fridge and the bulky (and boy is it bulky) sits in a plug at the back so it can’t be seen. I have quite a few other motion sensors but they’re all too bulky and I get fed up changing the batteries all the time. I have a zigbee network so zigbee would work for me, any suggestions?
With regard to my current problem, I’m sure it’s not cloud related as the device itself seems to trigger reliably (see the logs in my initial post). I am wondering if it’s a timing issue though. HA seems to poll the device every 20 secs. Maybe if the device triggers on but then a poll reads the device and reads it as off a short time later ( say 10 secs) the on state never gets registered in HA. Doesn’t sound right, but I can’t think of anything else. I’ll try and test your 5 secs theory.
Do you see it triggering in the wemo app reliably?
They are/used to be polled and push on movement detection. From what I was finding it was as if the push part was broken on the wemo device; polling still seemed to work.
Yep, it’s definately triggering in the app ok. In fact turning on debug (as per initial post) for the wemo integration shows that HA is seeing the state change reliably as well. For some reason I just can’t figure out the HA core is not registering the state change with the entity reliably. Only about 1 in 10 ON state changes are being registered. Interestingly, it never seems to miss turning OFF the entity. But I’m not really sure what triggers the OFF state, perhaps the 20 secs poll. I’ll try a few more things.
Update on this issue. I have another version of HA available that is quite old (0.88.2) It is detecting the motion sensor perfectly and I have been able to reproduce the necessary automations as an interim measure. Either something has changed between 0.88 and 0.112 or my instance of 0.112 is broken in some way. Time to log an issue for HA core.