Linptech ES1 simple but powerful presence sensor

if you have a smart home then you know that you can never have too many sensors and today we will be looking at this a bit different present sensor we'll check the smart life support Zha support and also Zig bit to mqtt we'll start in couple of seconds what motion sensors were couple of years ago present sensors are today everybody needs them everybody has a great use case for them but there are also tons of options on the market and the question is for what sensor you should go so far I have reviewed couple of them and each has its own Niche be it the size the price or the functionality of the device itself today we'll be looking at this one from limtech that was sent to me free of charge to do a review video on it if I find the device interesting and I did but there are some some quirks with it and we will talk about them later in the video for all of you that do not know what the presentence sensor is the difference between the presence and the motion sensor is that present sensor should detect objects or people pads in the room even if they are standing still or sitting down or lying in the bed motion sensors can only detect motion so that's the biggest difference also a lot of present sensors Puck additional functionalities in themselves besides just motion or present sensor it can be Lux temperature humidity or some additional sensors like the one I will be covering in the future such as CO2 sensor in the present sensor what is great thing about this Olympic sensor is that price is just about right if you go on the Amazon web page and try to find it there you will find it for around 3536 but there are also additional options and don't forget to check down the link because you can also find it on the AliExpress for about 20 to 30% a lower price than this one here so there are options and you can shop around to see where you can find the best deal for it as with all other present sensors I have covered and probably will be covered in the future this one also has USBC connector which allows you to plug it in via the very long wire or not so long wire that you receive it and hook it up to the power supply for all my tests with all those sensors I either use them hooked directly to my PC which has a eight port USB hub or I use external power bank to power them but if you for example have a mobile charger that has more than one port on it you can hook it up there that's also something that I'm using to power some of my devices if I remember I will also be leaving a link down in the video description for one of those charges that I have I think it has either three or four USB ports on it let's talk about missed opportunities the device itself is very nice it's not that big it has one LED that you unfortunately cannot control control and also part of that led is the switch button on the right side of that plate where you press and hold for 5 seconds to put the device in the pairing process and I will be doing it couple of times in this video to test it with Smart Life Zha and also Zig bit to mqtt but where is the issue the issue unfortunately is the back plate you can tilt the device up to 45° you cannot tilt it more because it will start to unhook from the device itself and it's using magnets for it I think that they could have used stronger magnets there are stronger magnets than this one here during my testing it never fell but I feel that there is a potential for this to be detached from the magnet or magnetic back plate the good thing about the device is that it also has lock capability I think that this device will be permanently attached to my recording desk and in future I will create automation well actually we can do that later in the video create automation whenever I sit on the table it will start LED strip behind my table this is something that I rarely do but also one additional thing that I can Implement in automation is to check the light sensor and by combining this present sensor and the light sensor I can have my lights turn on not those big lights but LED strip whenever I sit at my desk and this combo of presentence sensor and light sensor is something that I really do appreciate in terms of the distance it can measure up to 6 M I didn't test it in such environment I did test it to maximum around 3 3.5 M and I find it very accurate also what I found very accurate was the response time but let's now start adding it to our systems for start we will be using smart life you should already have zigby Hub added to your smart life if the zigby Hub has been connected and visible inside Smart Life click on it and click add sub device start the pairing process on the device by clicking and holding the button for 5 seconds and after it has started BL blinking click on lead already blinking it will take couple of seconds for device to be discovered and actually this is it you now have a sensor added to your smart life if you go on a Details page you will see information for example currently state of the sensor is presence meaning that somebody's here you can set motion detection sensitivity motionless detection sensitivity distance for the sensor and nobody time nobody time yeah I know the language in the app is Google translate I don't know what but the nobody time means that you can set how long to wait before there is no detection on the sensor before it declares that the room is not occupied you can check also illuminance value you can look at historical values in the app and same goes for the presence record to see if and when was the last time somebody triggered it and when the room was not occupied note that presence time here works really nice this is something that we will be also looking at in the home assistant integration I've already mentioned the current distance and it really is more or less very accurate and it was more accurate than some other sensors I've tested if we click on more information we can look at device information if there are any scenes added to it and information about the firmware or is it running the latest firmware or not and that's more or less it with the Smart Life app of course you can now create automations notifications whatever you normally do in smart life I don't use the Smart Life app except for testing of new devices and I do try to test every single device that I receive with the original manufacturers app and then hook it up to Home assistant with both Zha and Zig to mqtt and there are differences let's check the Zha integration in your home assistant inside zigby home automation or Zha click on ADD device and of course once again put the device in a ping mode by clicking and holding the button for 5 seconds the pairing process should be very fast device is is detected initialized and ready for use select an area and that's it and this now unfortunately is also an issue I did mention couple of quirks at the beginning of video well there is problem with one Quirk and this is a custom Quirk or support for this device inside Zha it is getting picked up by some alternative integration and it looks like this device is not fully supported inside Zha if you have time and wish to play with it you can try and create custom quirk that would pull other attributes from the sensor because they are available so if you are using Zha you will not be able to see anything here just the state is the device on and off and that means that there is a presence or no presence in the room which is a bit unfortunate for all of you using Zha but as you all know I prefer zigby to mqtt because it has much broader support and more devices are supported this video has been recorded on the day that usually zigby to mqtt releases a new release this is usually first day of the month so 1 of November the new release is still not out the official support for this link teex sensor was not present in the version previously but it should be available in the next release it is currently available in the edge release and why am I saying you that because when I was adding the device I had to resort to GitHub search there to see if anybody has added support or not and I've seen a long thread with a lot of posts from Aaron from make it work and if you haven't already subscribed to Aaron's channel the link to it will be also down in the video description he's an awesome guy and he's currently working on one very interesting video and that is the difference or comparison between multiple sensors and when I say multiple I think that there are like 20 or something sensors present sensors for home assistant so check him out but back to this so the support was not available but but since the community for zb2 mqtt is more alive than Zha community in my opinion somebody has also prepared the custom quirks or custom support for this sensor and after reading a lot of comments information blah blah blah here I managed to find the custom converter then I used in my install of coma system and by the way if you need custom converter anytime in the future and find it on the GitHub repository that has still not been pushed to the latest release you can go there copy the code go to your vs code or code editor or file editor whatever you're using and inside Zig bit2 mqtt folder create a file with JS extension JavaScript and paste the custom converter there then go to your zigby to mqtt settings page custom converters and here just paste or type in the name of the file for that custom converter and that's it the custom converter should now add support for unsupported device to zb2 mqtt but if everything goes well with the latest release of Zig B2 mqtt you should already have limtech device available and working out of box go to your zigby to mqtt click Start pairing or allow pairing press and hold the button on device for 5 seconds and the device will be added to your Zig bit to mqtt check if everything is okay and let's go to expose page to see what are the options that are available for this device if we check about page we will see that the image of the device is wrong actually there is a device that looks like this but this is not this device we get the information when was device last seen availability is it a router or not router means that the other devices and devices can attached to it which is awesome we have zigby model manufacturer description present sensor it is supported address Network address manufacturer and model if you click on this link it should open up the zig B2 mqtt device page and give you information about this device for me this is still not working because as I said it's not officially out although there is support in the edge version information about the power is it battery powered or Mains power and is the interview completed and when we look at exposes we can see that we have here much more options than we had with Zha if you fancy you can of course try and add everything that is available here also to Zha by creating custom quirks I'm not going to do that we can see the state of the sensor occupied or unoccupied we have information about the illuminance in Lux distance between the Target and sensor motion detection distance this means that it can detect up to 6 M if you need you can reduce the values for example for my work desk I can put that at 1 and a half M or 150 CM let's now talk about one issue at least for me at least now at least with my my custom converter and that is the present keep time the timer that worked perfectly in a smart Live app from tuya unfortunately doesn't work correctly here for me this should be a timer telling you how long the space is occupied or there is a presence in that space But unfortunately for me I just cannot figure out what those seconds mean because they stand still they jump they reset whatever so it's not working for me yet then we have option to set the motion detection sensitivity static detection sensitivity and with my custom converter it cannot be set to anything less than 10 seconds but you can set it to 10,000 seconds that is the time between when there is no Motion in the room or occupants in the room and the change in state from present to not present or from occupied to not occupied the longer the fading time setting here is the longer time it will take the sensor to reset to no occupancy and of course we have link quality but let's now go to home assistant and see what we can do with this sensor there with all of my testing unfortunately I lost the ability to set fading time motion detection distance motion detection sensitivity and static detection sensitivity these were all previously Fields where I can drag and drop and set the values for me currently they are static values so if I need to set something there I can either send mqtt string from within home assistant or go back to zb2 mqtt page and send those settings there which is a shame but I think that the problem is the custom converter because I was playing with it and I messed something up if everything works correctly in the latest zb2 mqtt you would be also able to control those settings or use those sliders and this is how it looks for me now we have fading time which is that time it needs to wait before it declares that there is no occupancy we have illuminous we have motion detection distance sensitivity static sensitivity is the motion detected or not presence keep time which I cannot simply figure out what that is and the target distance this is the distance between the sensor and the object or person it currently is detecting for example now is detecting my hands if we look at this example that I've created we can see that there are two triggers one is when it started detecting motion and the other one is when it stopped I'm here using trigger IDs if we wait for the sensor to reset we can see that it triggered the motion stop detecting and it also turned off the light or in this example we can see that the motion is clear and the light is turned off if I trigger the sensor the light will turn on and the motion is detected if we take a closer look at the automation it looks like this we have trigger for the limtech device when limtech motion started detecting motion duration is 0 seconds and we added the ID which is occupied that means that the state has turned to occupied then we also created additional trigger this trigger ID which was set by editing the edit ID here unoccupied once again Alm tech device and Alm Tech motion stop detecting motion then we created action with choose and we added two options first was condition when trigger ID by occupied the action is turn on stream desk LED and the option two is when triggered by unoccupied turn off the stream desk it's very easy to set it up by using the UI only of course you can do the same thing by using the yaml the link to this code in yaml will be down in a video description and I will be posting it on my GitHub and by the way all the automations for everything I'm using at my setup is always available free of charge on my GitHub repository so check it out but is this device actually worth buying it all depends once again on your use case yes it's a very good device it is supported via the Smart Life app and it is also supported or will be supported out of box in the latest release of zb2 mqtt there are cheaper devices and I did video on one cheaper device couple of weeks ago but that device inside Zha and zb2 M doesn't allow you to set up anything about it so for that case that device price may be better especially if you look at the price settings on the other side I did video on the room sense IQ which is a open source not DIY but Community sensor that has a lot more options so it all depends on your use case for me this device is staying on my desk and I will be using it with my recording setup I have set up here if you are using Zha unfortunately as you've seen the support currently in Zha is not OP pair with the zb2 mqtt but again this may change if somebody takes time and Designs custom quirks and then creates push to many repository this device could actually have the same functionality in Zha that is currently having in a zig bit2 mqtt so whatever sensor at the end you select I hope that this sensor suits your needs if this sensor fits your needs fits your use you know what automations you will be creating the link to it will be as I mentioned down in a video description and before I wrap up the video I really would like to thank all those wonderful people that are supporting me and that have become YouTube channel members thank you all for all of your support but let's not forget each and every one of you who has watched liked commented and of course subscribed to my channel thank you for all of your support if you too want to support the channel you can do so by clicking the join button down below or going to my merchandise store and buying something there I will be seeing you next time and the next video will be Mail Day video until the next time bye-bye and have fun

Channel: BeardedTinker

Views: 15,351

Keywords: human presence, home assistant, human presence detector, presence detection, mmwave sensor, presence sensor home assistant, presence sensor automation, linptech presence sensor, linptech es1, linptech human sensor, linptech presence sensor es1

Id: ywPGzyZg9JU

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2023