Dear community.
Does anyone have experience with zigbee temperature sensors powered by “normal” batteries (AA or AAA, preferably rechargeable)? I want to run them with a standard ZigBee USB Stick (Conbee).
Aliexpress seems to be full of them between 1.5€ … 10€, all look the same. Most of them claim to require a “special” tuya Gateway.
Do they work reliably? Are they really the same? Or is this a lottery game according to the price?
Greetings,
exae
Can you post a link to one? Is it because of battery life you want AA or AAA?
Here some examples:
https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005008002409039.html
https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005007339698351.html
Reason: standard battery which I have already at home. Rechargeable batteries exist for AAA. I expect it to last longer because of more capacity. Environmental reasons (coin cells contain mercury).
I would not get them. I actually wanted the same as you and got one of them (your last link) and it’s such a PITA to get them running, I gave up. I’ll probably get an aqara or sonoff one and be done with it.
I also hate the cr batteries and want to use rechargeable AAAs because they 1.) last longer (so don’t have to change them so often) and they I have tons of eneloops to use. But I guess it’s not worth the hassle. But please let me know if you find a device.
I’m using multiple Xiaomi temperature sensors, the first one I got uses a single AAA battery, but it’s hard to find nowadays and seems to be a bit expensive compared to alternatives. However, maybe you can find alternatives with this information.
I use a ESPHome board to fetch the bluetooth broadcasts out of the air. You can buy a ESP32 board very cheaply from Ali. Setting up the board isn’t that hard, but getting the sensors to broadcast data that you can actually use is a bit harder due to the encryption of that data and the private key not being available.
You can find a list of supported devices on esphome. The Xiaomi ones can be found here: Xiaomi Mijia BLE Sensors — ESPHome Another can be found here: PVVX MiThermometer Display — ESPHome but this device does use coin cells. For these devices you can actually use a computer with bluetooth to root the temperature sensors and unlock the broadcast (see the info on the linked esphome pages)
There does seem to be some support for Tuya devices, but it seems a lot harder to setup if I read some results from Google. Maybe you can find some more information when searching for esphome + tuya bluetooth temperature or something.