Building My Perfect Smart Home Presence Detection Sensor!

a few weeks ago i took you through a custom built room presence sensor which used millimeter wave to accurately detect the presence of a person even when there is no movement this is amazing for controlling things like smart lights in rooms where you don't tend to move around too much like a living room or a bedroom or an office and after that video that got me thinking about what other sensors could i combine with the millimeter wave to make my ideal room presence sensor and this is what i came up with as you can see we've done quite a few upgrades and it is glorious this guy features a whole host of useful sensors including a pir motion sensor light level sensor temperature humidity air pressure bluetooth and of course millimeter wave basically everything you can need for all of your room based automations let's take a run through all of the part selection and take a look at some comparisons against an off-the-shelf solution like the acara fp1 the thought behind creating this was i wanted to combine everything that i thought would be useful for any room-based automations into one single sensor or one single unit so that that could be used for smart lighting climate and zone controlled heating or air conditioning basically anything you might want to control based on room occupancy i also thought to create something that would beat or at least match the acara fp1 in terms of speed accuracy features and price point the first additional sensor other than the millimeter wave that i knew i wanted to have in here was a regular pir motion sensor if you remember back to the original video i mentioned that while the millimeter wave is pretty good i'd probably want to include a regular pir in here for even more speed don't get me wrong the millimeter wave sensor is really fast but occasionally it'll take just a fraction longer to respond than i'd like it and responsive lights are high on the priority list for me personally i hate when lights have a noticeable delay to them turning on now the pir sensor that most people use and that i have used in the past is the am 312 which is super cheap but can often give false positives from my experience in the past so for this project i decided to go for a much higher quality and accurate sensor and went for an industrial sensor from panasonic from their ekmc series it's small extremely accurate fast response time a 12 meter range and a fairly wide detection angle it's quite a bit more expensive per unit than the am 312 but it does a fantastic job and it's pretty much the gold standard of pirs without going for something crazy expensive the next edition was the light level sensor the purpose being that if i'm receiving motion and occupancy information from the sensor it makes sense to also get live updates of how bright it is in a room so that i know whether or not to turn the lights on instead of relying on something like the time of day or the position of the sun the bh 1750 is the light level center of choice it's pretty compact although not quite as small as i'd like works over i2c which is pretty simple to work with and doesn't require much wiring and has good support from esp home the other good thing about using i2c as your interface is that you can daisy chain multiple sensors together perfect for using with our third sensor which is the bme280 and that handles temperature humidity and air pressure having temperature and humidity on here is great for being able to control the heating or if you're in a hotter country the air conditioning which when combined with the occupancy sensor should make for some great potential energy savings air pressure is an added bonus here too the esp8266 from our old build was swapped out for an esp32 for two main reasons firstly because it has more pull down pins meaning that we can stack the millimeter wave sensor directly on top of it and have all of the pins line up perfectly in a row but also so that we can add bluetooth for figuring out who the person in the room actually is which can then be used for more personalized automations the only other sensor that i would have liked to have got in here would have been an air quality sensor that measures particulate matter but from researching these the good quality sensors that are actually worth having and give you good readings would have been a added quite a bit of bulk to the overall package and b are quite costly and would have put the price of this unit up quite significantly so i decided against adding that i mounted and soldered all of the sensors onto some pcb prototype board this was actually my first time using this prototype board as many of my projects live permanently on breadboards or get soldered directly to each other as i'm sure many of you can relate and overall it's pretty easy to do if you spend a few minutes beforehand planning out the layout before committing using the prototype board also makes it much easier to design an enclosure for for the software i of course decided to go for esb home once again and there have been some cool additions to the millimeter wave side that cr logic on the home assistive form has added so in addition to being able to control the distance and latency of the millimeter wave sensor you can now control the sensitivity of detection the led on the board and there is even the basics of tracking targets as they move around in front of the sensor which is amazing in addition to the work done by cr logic for the millimeter wave i then added the required code for the rest of the sensors to work you'll see that on top of being able to see the individual state of the pir and the millimeter wave sensor i've also created this occupancy sensor and this combines the state of both the motion sensors so that if any of them detect motion at any time the occupancy sensor will be on and this gives you the best of both in one single entity by the way if you want to turn your custom pcbs like this into fully fledged products check out our sponsor pcb way pcbway are the one-stop shop for all of your electronic project needs offering high quality pcb printing services cnc 3d printing injection molding sheet metal fabrication and everything else you need to make your diy project become a reality check them out with the link in the video description so in terms of features we are looking pretty good compared to the fp1 but what about speed reaction time of the sensor is lightning fast especially with the pir sensor that is included here is a three-way side-by-side with the acara fp1 the far left lamp represents the pir on our diy sensor the middle lamp represents the millimeter wave of the diy sensor and the right side is the acara fp1 funnily enough when i was setting up outside of the room ready to walk in the millimeter wave of the diy sensor actually caught me while i was still outside of the room which is pretty funny and also pretty cool as you can see the pir of the motion sensor is the fastest with the diy of the millimeter wave coming in just a fraction behind and then the fp1 is noticeably behind those two a few people have mentioned that you can use the presence event entity as a way of detecting fast entry compared to the present sensor and whilst it is faster it's still not a patch on the df robot millimeter wave or the regular pir sensor reliability and accuracy are pretty impressive too for both the millimeter wave and the pir the pir is very responsive and accurate even from quite a distance can pick up a surprisingly low amount of movement on their own plus because we are using esb home we can set the cool off period to whatever we want for both the pir and the millimeter wave all the way down to one second if we wanted to that's one of the advantages of using esb home is that we have full control over how everything works and how everything responds you can sit in your office or your living room for hours at a time and the occupancy sensor won't miss a single beat and just works every single time where you are sitting upright with your hands doing little movements or you're scrolling on your phone or your head moves around slightly or whatever those situations are absolutely no problem for this sensor however having it in a bedroom is a little more challenging i had this over on a taller unit in the corner of the room alongside the fp1 one night and whilst it is able to detect this i'd say around 95 percent of the time throughout the night there is the occasional time it will go off for a second or two whereas the fp1 is the exact same position and didn't have that problem and kept us constantly tracked the entire night that's possibly because the fb1 uses 60 gigahertz instead of 24 gigahertz and it can detect even finer movements possibly not sure but then i placed both sensors underneath the bed pointing up and this gave the diy sensor a perfect result and detected us continuously throughout the entire night i think if you mounted it up higher on the wall it would also work a lot better but i didn't get a chance to try that just yet motion controlled lights are a staple in the smart home these days but one of the problems with light sensors included in some battery motion sensors is that the light levels aren't updated very frequently which can result in big jumps in light levels or the light levels get sent whenever motion is detected but by that time it's too late to actually decide whether or not you want the lights to come on or not by using that light level because it's out of date information but with this answer we can update the lux levels every minute or even quicker if we wanted to so that we always have the most up-to-date light level available which can then be used to in automations to turn the lights on if it's dark enough or leave them off if it's still bright very useful for convenience and also for energy savings another practical use you could do with this is for zone controlled automations with something like the shelley trv where you could control the individual zones for heating or for air conditioning depending on if someone was actually present in the room or zone using the inbuilt temperature sensors to decide if heating or cooling was actually needed it's also just generally great for making sure you haven't left anything on in a room if you've been out of the room for 20 minutes then we can turn off tvs computers lights xboxes heating and any of those other big power drawing devices bluetooth functionality is the only thing that i haven't got deep into using yet i do have it track my phone and it works well for the most part and is useful for doing personalized automations such as a morning announcement for your upcoming schedule for that day or for setting lighting to your personal preference or whatever it is now at the moment we are at a little bit of a crossroads for bluetooth you could either go for esp home like i did and have full control over all of the sensors and have bluetooth be a secondary priority or you could go for something like es presence which does bluetooth really well but doesn't have nearly the same level of control over all of the rest of the sensors particularly the millimeter wave sensor for setting things like distance and sensitivity esp home does do bluetooth tracking but it's more basic than es presences but for me the other sensors were a much more important aspect than bluetooth was so that's why i went for esp home it's just a shame that we don't have anything that can do everything all in one package size wise our diy sensor is a bit bigger than the fp1 and the fp1 is certainly a much neater package overall but with a bit more time i think i could get this to be a bit more compact plus our diy sensor does have a removable cable where the fp1 does not the fp1 is also zigbee which normally i prefer to being wi-fi since because it's a wired device and not battery it would help to improve our zigbee mesh but for whatever reason acara didn't implement the router functionality in fp1 so it's not doing anything for our zigbee mesh there plus being wi-fi means that we can use esp home and get more granular control over all of the functionalities which makes it super customizable everything from the blind time latency temperatures and light levels you can really tailor this to however you want to fit your needs finally what about price so i bought my original fp1 for 65 pounds not including shipping so that was the price point i had in my head to beat and the total spend on this sensor was 62 pounds and seven pence so pretty much identical to the fp1 from a price perspective but in my opinion it has so much more functionality so overall i am really happy with how this whole sensor turned out if you want to make one of these for yourself i'll link everything i use down in the description if you want to check any of them out other than that that is going to do it for me please leave me a comment down below and let me know what you think of this sensor would you like one of these in your house and what automations would you do with it in fact actually is there any other modifications i could have done to add to this sensor to make it your ideal room present sensor is there anything i missed let me know down in the comments and perhaps we can do a v2 or i guess it would be a v3 at this point if you haven't already seen it make sure to check out the first video i made on this diy millimeter wave sensor over here make sure to drop this video a like and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 182,583

Keywords: smart home, home automation, home assistant, Aqara FP1 sensor, aqara smart home, smart home tech, smart home gadgets, room presence detection, smart home automation, mmwave sensor, home automation ideas, esphome, home assistant automation, room detection, diy motion sensor, diy home automation, diy smart home, diy room presence detection, diy room presence sensor, diy light sensor, diy sensors, esp32, esphome home assistant, custom built room presence sensors

Id: Viqvx7hMMJs

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022