Detect Human Presence with this CHEAP sensor and Home Assistant.

today I'm going to show you a 24 GHz mmwave detector that I found rather inexpensively on Amazon through a social media post so let's get [Music] started now this is the actual sensor and I've already unboxed it so you don't have to go through all that look me look at me opening a box but it's the linp Pres sensor ES1 smart motion sensor with 24 gig mmwave radar human body exist sensor detector requires all that stuff anyway that's what it is here's the Box nothing super exciting about a box um but it does come with this cable which is the the USBC power cable that you'll use with it and here's the actual sensor this is the um Lin PCH sensor I think there's some other versions of this um things to cons to keep in mind is that this right here is is um does it have a number on it let me see if I can figure this out here uh the ES1 ZZ uh what else do we have on here zigg Communications mode of zigg and I thought I had a uh chipset or something on here but it doesn't anyway that's that's the model number and everything in case you're interested in which one this actually is uh it does make a difference to the two stuff and then of course here's a USBC port on here and there's a button somewhere I think oh you just push the whole thing down I believe anyway this is the mount for it and this Mount is magnetic so even on the back of this there's a magnet in here so if you had something magnetic you could stick it to that but it also allows you to take this pad right here and stick it on whatever you want and then just Snick stick this on here uh um it does rotate freely and the other thing is the power cord is here so if you put it on a wall or something you're going to have to stick it I don't know stick it like that on the wall maybe something like this and then the power cord is available but if you tilt it down at all from the wall to angle it down that power cord is going to be in the way so you almost have to either do it from the side uh so the power cords on the side or from the top I have it sitting on a desk when it's in play and the power cord actually sits on top and the power cord comes out here and that's sometimes a problem because then it'll pull this backwards or it'll make it spin or whatever because the power cord's kind of dragging it down so you got to make sure the power cord doesn't have any tension on it when you plug it in or it's just going to move this because it moves so freely on the mount anyway this is the sensor and these sensors are designed to be at uh chest height or they're designed to be um a little bit above they say maximum is 2 meters and then of course you would take this and you would angle it down so that it is pointed down at chest someone's chest and the reason you do that is um yeah if you open that too far you can see here it actually you only you have a limit to far that can open um if you hav't down their chest because it's going to pick up Micro Motions and breathing and allow it to detect that someone is still in the room also has a light sensor in here so it can detect light levels and I do have an automation I use that allows me to do the light levels on it so that's the sensor itself uh and of course the box it does come with a little manual and it does talk about in this manual uh connecting the Smart Life app I'm not going to do anything with that I'm not using the Smart Life app I'm going to plug this directly into home assistant and I'll I'll show you that in a moment it does talk about the install wiring and the installation steps in here um it tells you where to put it and how high it should be and all of that other stuff so it can read the the motions and the Micro Motions and all of that um so little manual that comes with it all right so let's get into talking about how we make this work in home assistant all right so that's what the sensor looks like it come that's what comes in the Box keep in mind that these are not your standard uh motion sensors there's some requirements that you need to keep in mind one is they are radar based and that means that they can see through walls in some cases and see through obstacles so uh I have a green screen behind me right now and that that sensor has no problem going through the green screen to detect that I'm in the room if you have a thin wall or a glass door or something and you aim it out towards that it's very likely that will see motion on the opposite side of that that uh that wall and also as I mentioned there's the manual and it talks about in the manual it sees things such as um fluttering curtains moving metal green plants clothes running air conditioning uh other stuff like that it will pick up that as motion and create false alerts so that's one of the drawbacks to a sensor like this is it sees more it's more sensitive but it picks up more and can cause more false alerts than maybe a regular motion sensor so you have to use it in places where it makes sense in the room I've got it in here in the studio um I don't have a lot of extra motion so when I walk into this room it's dark there are no windows in the studio I have a little lamp that comes on only if I don't have the overhead lights on so it uses an Automation and I'll show you that later on okay so that's one thing um what else I want to talk about uh with this p p sensors are designed to Det detect micro Motion in sleeping in sitting and stuff like that so it knows there's somebody in the room even when there's minute motion uh so you have to place it appropriately like I mentioned in the uh unboxing it needs to be at a maximum of 2 meters which is about 6 feet I think uh and it needs to be aimed at something that's moving in in your in this case like a person's chest they're breathing it will pick up the breathing uh and it will detect that someone's in the room so that those are some things to think about now let's talk about getting it in the home assistant now this is a zigby device and it does not come out of the box uh capable of being used in um zigg to mqtt let me talk about that I'm using zigg to mqtt the add on here in home assistant the reason I use zigg to mqtt is because it is um there are a number of community developers that will take devices that are either bleeding edge or just non-standard zigg stuff which zigg has no standards almost and they will be able to apply um the engineering knowledge or their knowledge to be able to get what they call converters or devices into zigby uh to mqtt and so in order to uh make this work we actually need to create a converter file uh and and that allows us to make this work so if you look at um Studio presence sensor now it's offline because I have it unplugged because I was showing it to you see promise it's sitting right here not plugged in anything um but it is now a supported device because I added a converter it's not hard to add the converter if you're using zigg to mqtt then all you have to do is put a file in the appropriate directory and I'll show you that here in a second if you're using something like Zha with home assistant I don't really know if this works natively out of Zha it probably doesn't um Zha is more standards compliant and it takes longer for things to get added to Zha than in Z zigby to mqtt so if you're doing z uh zway uh if you're doing zigby stuff um I always recommend using this one uh if you're going to be doing um non-standard or new devices because they'll show up here first before they show up in other uh controllers okay so with that being said let me talk about now how we get this to work before I do that let me just talk about where I'm going to get this code from if you if you look at the zigg mqtt GitHub page there's a lot of issues and a lot of requests for uh new devices to be added and whatnot in this case that's what the that's what's going on here is there's a whole discussion here from the community and this is what makes z2m nice uh is that someone is on here reverse engineering these things and it allows them allows you to um use the knowledge of the community to actually add these converters and that's what this is the code for this is in here and it's also on my blog post so if you want to look at my blog post you can use the code that I did in order to make this work now when you install zigby to mqtt you'll have a directory called zigby to mqtt so I'll go to my file editor and I've already done this I'm just going to show you how it actually works uh if I go to the zigg can I make this bigger for you yeah if I go to the z2m the zigg to mqtt directory uh where is it at right here you'll see a directory here and it's got a number of files in it now the important piece to remember here is that the device you or the file name you create is going to have to match the device model that's in the file so it knows to pick it up and I've done that here that's why you see this file called TS 0225 .js that's the model number that I specified in the file I I don't know if it's arbitrary it might just be an arbitrary I could put Bob's your uncle in here and then as long as the file name is correct then it would pick it up uh this was an example I found somewhere and I think I left it even though I didn't uh change the model properly um and now I just confused everyone the point is make sure that this file namejs matches the uh the file or the model number so you'll create a file and you can do that here by clicking on a new file and then when you create a new file you'll take the code either from my blog post or that GitHub page and you'll post it in here paste it in here and it'll show all of this stuff you can read about how or what all these things do in that gith hug post if you want to uh if you just want to paste and get things working then you can do that as well the model is here which you can barely see on the video because it's so tiny TS 0225 well that's the name of the file TS 0225 JS it is a Javascript file you would paste all of this in here and then You' restart zigby to mqtt and once you do that if you don't get any log or any errors then uh you're ready to add the device now this particular device uh to add it all you do is you uh let me go back over here it's like adding any other zigby to mq TT device you click on permit join and if you have multiple coordinators you would choose that now notice this studio presence which is this device right here the new device actually acts as a hub in zigg which means that you can actually have devices connect to this uh as something else so it can be a repeater for your zigby network uh so that's nice anyway you choose what you wanted to join to and then on this device itself you actually are going to hold down uh this button there's a the actual light sensor thing is a button as well you hold that down uh and then it will join up to this you'll see some uh some notification just like any other zigby device if you've ever added anything in z2m it's the same thing just follow along as it gets added once it gets added and does this interrogation and polling then you will see it uh go to hopefully online and support it in fact let me uh plug it in here get get this uh power cord unwrapped and I we just go ahead and plug it in so that it will show up as online I ran this initially on a battery for like a week um just one of these like little little RAV Power Batteries or whatever I ran it for a week and it worked pretty well on the battery uh it worked very well on the battery I wouldn't recommend that you do that for a long term um because it will kill a battery uh now you see it's online here so that's good the picture doesn't quite match because um that hasn't been updated in my database here but you do see it's online it tells you it's uh the tz3 3218 aarh a USB device that's important because this actually will determine how the converter is set up and uh there are some of these that are similar looking but they are slightly different manufacturer um ID thing here and so they won't use the same converter code it might be close but it won't be exact uh so it's powered up you can see now and oh one other thing I want to point out about these U present sensors is majority of them require constant power because they're sitting out a constant radar pulse to determine if there's movement or detect a human presence in a room so there there are a little bit more battery intens or a little bit more power int intensive than uh like your standard sixe battery life motion detector that you get with an alarm system or something else I have heard discussions and read some discussions on some low power chips that are being uh put into some of these now and so we may see some battery operated presence detectors come out uh and if there's already some out there I apologize I don't know of them but uh most of them have to be powered somehow and that makes a mounting option a limitation for where you put these if you're going to do them at desk height for room presence detection um or you know countertop height and you got a plug there those will work that way so anyway just keep that in mind they have to be powered by the battery all right so this is online now and it's ready to go you can also tell that it's working by going to the exposes tab here and you can see uh these options you can actually change the motion detection distance and the sensitivity in my experiment experimentation I've found that I've had to set both of these to Max uh I don't mess with fading time I don't really understand well it says the time after which the device will check again for presence so every 30 seconds it checks for presence to make sure you actually can adjust this um and what that means is when it goes from presence to detected to not detected um if you set up an automation to determine or watch for those values this will be the value where it checks at so if I come in the room and 30 seconds later I walk out 30 or and then I walk out 30 seconds after that then you will the S the device will say hey there's no one in the room and then it'll do whatever it needs to do of course you get your link quality stuff that you get typically from a z a zigby device um I don't really understand this presence keep time because I'm new in the p in the uh the presence detector world there's a lot of discussion I think about this value specifically and how it works in other areas and then occupancy tells you it's occupied currently illuminance is 486 LX Lux so let me turn off my studio lights hold on one second here and see let's watch that number see how quickly that reacts it's now 189 Lux so I turn it back on it'll go back up to 400 500 whatever the Luxe value is and if I Shadow it with my hand then the value should drop a little bit as well there it goes I can make it maybe completely dark let's see 59 Lux so you can use this in your automations and I actually do that your target distance is how how far it has detected um motion and I've got it pointed at my screen so that's probably not a good indicator if I point it away from myself over at the wall um currently let's see if it even picks it up Target distance is 194 as you play with this and you want to know well what is my motion detection distance going to be set for you can actually sit in front of this thing or walk around in front of it out to the range you want it to pick up somebody or a human detection and you can actually then set this value to either slightly below that or equal to that and then you'll know that if somebody walks within the target distance that it's measuring here that you'll be able to uh pick it up by setting this to the proper value the other thing to consider to is where it's sitting I'm not sure why it's doing this but it shows me 71 cm and because I'm dumb um let me see what that means in feet two feet that's the distance looks like from uh the wall to this device so it might be picking up activity outside on the other side of the wall or or I don't know what it's doing actually uh anyway the point is you can use this device or this distance as experiment as you experiment with where you're in the room at to determine how far to set that and then of course there's all these other things up here a lot of them don't really do a lot it can tell you the current state which you're basically getting from this exposed as well okay so this is here now how does it get into home assistant as an entity well it's uh if you're using zigg to m qtt and you have Discovery enabled in home assistant which is done by default now it should automatically create um packets in home assistant if you use something like mqtt Explorer you can actually see what it's doing here under Zig mqtt you can look at the presence and you can see its status and what it's doing and look here's the illumination illuminance um and then all of these other things that are in this particular device so it's helpful to look at that and then the home assistant packet will send out um Discovery packets like this oops where' that go uh it'll send out a discovery packet and this discovery packet will then configure those entities in home assistant so it's very simple if you're running something like zigby to mqtt or zigg or zwave JS UI those will automatically create devices in home assistant once they're discovered or added to these particular uh controllers all right so what else do want to say about this particular device um oh let's talk about the uh let's talk about the automation real quick um the automation that I use in home assistant for this so if I go over to automations I'll show you that momentarily the automation code is also on my blog post for this uh let's look for uh Studio guest so it's confusing this used to be in the guest bedroom this lamp that I'm using so I have it called gu lamp but it's really in the studio and then I have Studio presence whatever so this particular automation will do this particular thing when presence is detected actually what I do here is I have two different um triggers when presence uh motion is or when Studio presence motion changes to detected so when the sensor picks up detected or detects a human and also when it is cleared and I have um the ID set in here so that the trigger ID is presence detected presence cleared and then what happens down here under the action section is I have two different options option is when triggered by presence detected as long as the illumination is below 150 Lux then I want to turn on that guess lamp if it's not below 150 so ex again if I have these overhead lights on and I uh come into the room I don't necessarily need to have the guess lamp on it's bright enough as it is but if it's dark in here and I walk in I want that light to come on so this uses both the detection uh of that sensor and the the light level detection the Lux detection in that sensor in one device to be able to do this automation now when the presence clears then of course I want to turn off the guest lamp and that happens after that 30 seconds and if I walk out of the room there should be no human presence detected and then it does that and if you're interested in the yaml version of this here it is I have this yaml version on my blog post as well which of course I'll link down below and this will give you an idea of what it does here okay well that's it final thoughts on this particular device I've had it in service for couple of weeks maybe three weeks now uh it was fairly inexpensive on Amazon in fact right now on Amazon it is um $35.99 uh there is a $5 coupon no 20% coupon which brings it down to whatever that 20% of that is so it's on basically on sale right now so you can get these things on Amazon and I don't know why I'm not showing you you it's $5.99 on Amazon again you can check that coupon and get it cheaper than that if you want um I've seen presence sensors higher than that maybe there's some a little bit lower than that but this one seems to work very well it's solid it acts as a zigby hub or it's supposed to I I looked at my zigby mapping and it actually shows something connected to it so it must be it must be hubbing it must be repeating uh it it is um fast so I guess some of that goes for how my network is set up too but as soon as it detects presence Boom the lights come on and then with within 30 seconds after leaving the room boom the lights go off so it's it's triggering quickly it also doesn't seem to do hardly any if at all false alerts I never see the lights come on or off when no one's in the room H but no one's in the room so does it make a sound but buum all right so anyway I know if the lights on because I have other notifications and things that happen so I I don't see any false alerts on it and um it's it works well for what it is is the only thing I would say again is about the mounting piece of it you know you got to kind of mess with this mount a little bit after doing and playing with this I realize I was kind of messing around with this and I have the uh the wire up like this and it pulls back on this Mount and makes it kind of go backwards well I I had a duh moment I said well what if I just lay this thing down where the wire is kind of sitting on the desk like that at the bottom and then it won't pull it backwards I I don't know this thing rotates 100 80 uh 360 Degrees you can put it on here anywh you want and wherever this this power cord needs to go well you just adjust it accordingly so maybe the mount is not as bad as I thought it was so um you just have to make it fit and point to where you're going to make it work at let me see what else there was another picture I wanted to show you here I don't know if it's on this or not um if it talks about the radius of this it's on the manual uh the manual the little book booklet thingy where's it at you probably can or cannot see this but um also I can't show it to you very well there is a in here there is a little man a little diagram which will not focus it looks like 85 Degrees side to side so pretty much a full 180 degrees front from side to side so you're going to get coverage from all the way around the front of the sensor so if you want to put it somewhere to get the room without false positives don't aim it towards doors where people might walk by put it towards the other direction away from the door um so just keep keep in mind where you want to mount that okay we're getting longwinded as I always do on my videos um that's about it it's a great sensor for the price it works well I haven't had any issues with it the only cavat right now is just not completely supported in uh zigg mqtt yet but it will be because work has been done as you see in that GitHub and by the time you watch this video it might just be picked up automatically I would try adding it first if you have the latest version of z2m and see if it just picks it up out of the box if not then add that converter file and then you should be in business all right let me know if you have any questions in the comments down below also on Discord I'm available sometimes I get to Discord before I get to the YouTube comments just because that's the way it works so if I don't respond to you in the comments hit me up on Discord uh with that thanks for watching thanks to those who are supporting me in their various ways and for subscribers to the channel if you're not a subscri subcriber just push the button it's real quick and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: mostlychris

Views: 12,691

Keywords: Smart Home, Home Assistant, linptech presence sensor, linptech es1, linptech human sensor, linptech presence sensor es1, linptech sensor, linptech tuya, presence sensor, human presence, home security, human presence detector, room detection, mmwave sensor, mmwave presence sensor, mmwave human presence sensor, mostly chris, mostly chris homeassistant, presence sensor home assistant, presence detection, zigbee2mqtt home assistant, z2m home assistant

Id: MyQwAjcLw0g

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2023