Was not too sure where to put this so, as my Hue Motion sensor is directly on ZHA instead of going through the Hue hub, here we are.
A few weeks ago, I’ve connected my Hue motion sensor to ZHA and created an automation to turn on a light for 3 minutes when between this time and this time. It worked perfectly based on the binary_sensor.salon_mouvement_motion entity ID. I did the last HA update a few days ago and, while I’m not sure it is related, my automation stopped working. Looking at the device, there is now an Occupancy entity. If I change the automation to use the binary_sensor.salon_mouvement_occupancy, it started to work again.
My question is to understand what happened that would have added the occupancy entity and made the motion entity useless?
I’ve included an image of what I’m seeing in HA. I have two sensors (occupancy and motion) but only occupancy will changed status when somebody move while last week, it was the motion one that was acting this way.
My motion sensors have been like this ever since I switched from Hue to ZHA some months ago - I can’t find any information about what the “motion” sensor does and I have disabled it. Occupancy is the one to use in automations.
In the settings for that entity there should be a “show as” dropdown so that you can set it to “motion” and get the right icon behaviour. You can also change the entity_id to binary_sensor.salon_mouvement_motion so that your automations will carry on working as before.
I’m surprised to learn it ever worked on the motion entity using ZHA. I’v been using it for over two hears and it never did for me. The way I understood it is that ZHA recognized it automatically, but it is not fully compatible so it does not work the way it should.
That is why ZHA applies a quirk to create the occupancy entity that does work.
Can’t really explain what happened. I understand that now it is as it should be but it was working for sure. It’s my wife who realized that it was not working anymore as she is often going to bed just after the light is turned off and she rely on this to walk to the stair
Is it possible that the device was recognized the same way as the same sensor coming from the hue hub? Because I have another one that is on the Hue hub and this one is working with motion. There is no occupancy when doing it this way.
It would stand to reason that the one through the hue bridge does not have a malfunctioning entity and a workaround, so that makes sense. They would probably also have the same id internally, so if you switch one from Hue to ZHA it would probably adopt the old device and add the extra entity.
I should try it with the second hue motion sensor but… there is no real point in putting the effort knowing that even if it may still work with the motion entity, at some point it will probably do the same and revert to occupancy. And based on what I read from other, if I would not had the Hue hub in the first place, I would not have seen the motion entity at all as only the occupancy entity would have shown. Right?
So I’ll just have to decide on which side of the fence I’m putting those sensor. Any advantage in keeping those in the Hue hub instead of directly through ZHA?
I know that for the Lutron Zigbee dimmer (the round button), ZHA seems to have issue with recognizing the push of the button which work very well with the Hue hub. So if there is something similar to know on the Hue motion sensor, I would be interested to know about it.
Nope, ZHA will automatically try to add all clusters it recognizes, and does not realize it isn’t working. So it will always show until you disable it yourself.
