ZigBee Arrival Sensor For Car

Hardware
#37

@mebaddog2002,

Thanks for letting me know. The sensor use 1 cell rechargeable lipo battery with jst ph 2.0 connector. This is commonly known as rc toy battery. I look for capacity of 300 to 600 mhA. Below is an example,

Please watch the battery size if you are going to get a case with the sensor.

The battery should last 1 month at minimum.

Please do not operate it with a battery and charge the sensor once a month. The sensor is designed to take advantage the knowledge of state of power supply. It is not purely running on a battery like the ST sensor.

#38

I just want to update everyone that I am expecting the a batch of the Arrival Sensor. All components needed to make the sensor has been allocated. It is being assembled at the moment. I expect to received them in matter of weeks now versus months.

Meanwhile, here is another aspect of the Arrival Sensor that I am very excited about. I did start this project with the motivation to automate the garage door. As the time goes, I am also happy to have the additional sensor setup for my cars parked on my drive way. I started to integrate the motion and shock sensor event to my home lighting. The part where it can help securing my car in the driveway becomes very important.

My Youtube feed pop this to my attention. Here is a Canadian reporting on car theft. It is not as sexy as “Gone in 60 seconds”. But, it is quite eye opening. Many car is stolen under the watch of our camera. One of the comments that stick to me is that they find out the car is gone in the morning. It is a long video. I link it to the part that is interesting.

My sensor may not be able to prevent the theft. But, I hope that with the help of my house lighting I can set up something to scare the thieve. If the car is stolen any way, I am notified as soon as possible (not the morning after). I hope I am giving my car and myself a fighting chance.

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#39

Everyone,

I have received a batch of released version of the Arrival Sensor. I am very happy how it come out. The manufacture assemble the sensor better than what I can do.

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I know that some of you have reach out to me to try out the Arrival Sensor in PM. I should be able to accommodate you with one or more sensors. I also have availability with antenna and radar motion sensor. I will try to go through my list from your requests. However, please do help with sending me another reminder if you happen to come across this post.

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#40

Just an update. I have shipped the sensor for those who requested it. You should received them real soon. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

#41

It seems that I have not mentioned possible cases for the Arrival Sensor. I just want to add some information for possible cases here.

  1. For all of use who own 3D printer, I have a couple box choices here. I recommend this case if you will be using the radar motion sensors.
  1. There is an off the shelve aluminum case that will fit. The case is not compatible with motion radar sensor since aluminum will block the radar signal. You can purchase it from Aliexpress. This link is an example only. The vendor sometime run out of stock. There are plenty other vendor selling maroon colored aluminum box with size of 23x44x60mm.
#42

I just want post update here that the Zigbee2MQTT converter has been merged to the Zigbee2MQTT trunk. It is a good news for us who use he arrival sensor user. The time to copy the external converter will shortly be over once the addon pick up this change.

#43

In case someone need to perform factory reset. Here are the steps.

  1. remove all power (battery and dc)
  2. press the button on the back of the board.
  3. plug the dc power and count to 4 to 5 seconds (not more).
  4. release the button. At this point, the module is in pairing mode.

I tested each sensor before I shipped them at this point with my hub. I removed the sensor after testing. The sensor will be automatically in pairing mode removal. This process may not went through cleanly during my test. Therefore, if your sensor does not paired on your first try, please perform the factory reset.

#44

I just want to update here that the arrival sensor converter for Zigbee2MQTT is now included with Zigbee2MQTT installation. It is part of Zigbee2MQTT release 1.25.2.

It meant is that there is no need of manually copying the converters. You can just start ZigBee paring/joining process as soon as you received the sensor.

BTW, I still have some modules available if you are interested. Please PM me for detail.

#45

@iharyadi any plans for a matching custom Zigbee device handler (a.k.a. quirk) for the ZHA integration via the ZHA Device Handlers library for Home Assistant (a.k.a. zha-quirk) to ship in repo as standard?

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#zha-exception-and-deviation-handling

https://github.com/zigpy/zha-device-handlers

https://pypi.org/project/zha-quirks/

If you do a pull request for it then support for it will be included with Home Assistant core as standard.

#46

Hi @Hedda, I would love to develop ZHA quirk for the Arrival Sensor. I am aware one of community member is working on creating a quirk for it. As soon as I heard about the progress, I will update everyone here.

I personally looked at the ST Arrival sensor quirk. I used it to learn how the quirk is implemented to support ST Arrival sensor. The quirk use zha device tracker mechanism for device presence state. My Arrival Sensor has a little bit different twist. I would like the have different timeout when the Arrival Sensor is on DC or Battery power. My Arrival Sensor may have to implement its own tracking mechanism to support that. The reason I would love the time out is dynamic depending on the state of the power is that I can configure much shorter timeout when the arrival sensor detect the car is powered up. This will make detection of “not present” faster.

I am not very proficient in python. With my other works, it may take some time for me to get this done. Just in case @Hedda or Anyone who are proficient with writing ZHA quirk and willing to help, I will be open to provide you with one Arrival Sensor for free to develop the quirk. Just PM me. We will work out the logistic.

#47

@iharyadi Maybe you can contact + ship one directly to @dmulcahey as the main ZHA quirks dev

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#48

@Hedda,. Thanks for the recommendation. I will definitely reach out to dmulcahey as soon as I back from my vacation.

#49

Alternatively, you could try asking @puddly or better yet ask both as that might yeald best result.

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#50

Loving your sensors but have been having a few problems. The battery percentage never changes and in one of my cars that the cig lighter turns off when the key is off the battery is only lasting just over a week and then the sensor dies with the battery still at 100%. I was just watching this sensor and it is sending updates every few seconds and shows the power state as off.

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#51

@mebaddog2002, Thank you for bring this issue up to me. I will be happy to help you with it.

The battery is measured based on the battery voltage. This method calculating the % capacity is just an estimation. I bring this up since there is possibility that you may have a bad battery. A battery that goes bad typically will drop in voltage really quickly. Therefore, it is possible that the percentage will looked like it is stuck at 100%.

Do you have any other battery to test with? I think we should start from that.

In addition, if you can enable Z2M logging to verbose for a few ours and filter the log just for this specific sensor based on its mac address. We are looking messages whether the sensor is frequently drop and rejoin the Z2M. If this happen very often, It will drain the battery. The process of rejoining consume huge amount of power. Let try to eliminate the issue. I am sorry I do not remember the exact line of the log message. It is really obvious message that Z2M print when a sensor joined back.

I want to make sure that I do not waste your time by sending you replacement if the Arrival Sensor is actually not the issue.

However, if we determine that the sensor somehow goes bad, I will send you a replacement. However, I do ask for your favor to return the bad one. This is very rare and valuable occurrence. When I want to be able to study which part of the sensor is degrade. I may be able to make improvement for future builds. It will help me and the user in our community.

Thanks
Iman

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#52

Okay will try to get the logs this weekend. I have the battery problem on multiple sensors. 1 is stuck at 40%. It was not fully charged when included because of testing. I had the battery in a vehicle recently die and the sensor still showed 100% all the way until the battery in the sensor died. The battery in the sensor didn’t even make it 2 weeks. Jump started the vehicle the sensor rejoined the network immediately and showed 100%. When I start the car that the sensor dies because the cig lighter turns off as soon as I start the car the sensor connects and shows 100%.

#53

Is it possible to try with a different battery or new battery is even better?

Battery drop, especially lithium, is possible.

Do you have a link to the battery that you use just for my information?

I just want to assure you that I have no issue sending you new sensors. I just want to make sure that we have a good battery. If this is not a battery issue, I can find out more what is wrong with it.

#54

Sorry its taken so long to get back to you work has had me gone. Here is a link to the batteries I bought. Going to try this week to switch batteries in 2 of them to see if the problem follows the battery or stays with the board. I doubt its a board problem. After trying to watch it the 2 vehicles that shut off the cig lighter the batteries die in about a week. 1 of the vehicles stays in the garage and even with the cold snap of -4 the garage stayed above 60. And I never see the battery percent change. I’m trying to get logs for you but for some reason it is only keeping a few lines then deleting the older ones. I’m only able to see 2 to 5 lines from each sensor. Any idea on how to increase how much it stores before deleting the older log entries?

https://a.co/d/4YKRdoq

#55

The log should be backed in a file. It depend on how you install the Z2M. In docker installation, you may need to get to the container and look into the Z2M folder for log files.

I don’t have exact folder name on top of my head. It should be either in typical linux logs folder or in Z2M installation folder.

#56

Is this still an active project? I’d love to get a pair of these with cases if possible. Let me know and I’ll be more than happy to pay if not TOO crazy :slight_smile: .