Sensing The Future // Aqara FP2 Master Guide

now if you've been paying attention to the smart home space in the last few months of course you've heard of one of these this is the acara fp2 a new style presence sensor that can add a completely new level of intelligence to your home but what makes this thing so special now you might have seen a ton of YouTubers and smart home bloggers talk about it and throw around words like Game Changer and revolutionary but what exactly makes this different than this and why is it that only the fp2 can do this [Music] so stay tuned as we dive into the technology behind the new fp2 and learn how it can bring a whole new whole new level of intelligence to your smart home [Music] this is Ryan with this Smart House on this channel we do smart home tech reviews and in-depth project guides So today we're going to be taking a look at a new style of presence sensor from acara the fp2 this sensor uses a new technology called millimeter wave or mm wave for short and unlike traditional presence sensors that use passive infrared or PIR this has a whole host of new features and allows you to do much more in-depth automations in your smart home so just a quick thank you to acara for sending me this hard to find sensor and for sponsoring today's video there's an earlier version of this sensor from acara called the fp1 and also one from fellow YouTuber Lewis from everything smart home that he actually developed with his dad plus you can also purchase millimeter wave sensors to make DIY versions of your own sensor like this one from Seed Studio but why is the millimeter wave sensors that much better than that of passive infrared well quickly let's dive into the science of how these sensors actually work so starting with the passive infrared sensor these sensors have been around since the 70s and really haven't changed all that much except for becoming Dirt Cheap to produce PIR sensors are electronic devices that measure infrared light that radiates from objects in the field of view they're called passive because they don't actually emit any energy for detection they simply detect the infrared energy given off by other objects like humans or animals every object living or non-living emits some form of infrared radiation the warmer the object is the more radiation it emits this is how things like flare cameras work PIR sensors work by detecting the changes in this radiation within the detection zone now if you've ever seen the movie sneakers and I know that's a dated reference the entire plot of the final scene in the movie revolves around raising the background temperature in an office so that when Robert Redford's character enters the room the sensors cannot detect him this works because the infrared sensors in that room were blinded by the background heat caused by turning the room's temperature up to body temperature by the way if you haven't already seen this movie go watch it it's a great 90s Heist movie in one of my favorites a PIR sensor will constantly adjust based on the background infrared radiation this is why if you have an infrared sensor in your living room and the shades are open the sensor doesn't get set off when the Sun hits the windows it's constantly making minute changes to what it determines is the background temperature and that way when a warm body does pass through it can set off the sensor now this is great if you want to detect motion happening in a room or hallway but if a person is standing in a room for more than a minute or so the sensor is going to think it's background heat and will turn off that's why most of your passive infrared sensors are truly motion and not present sensors that's where millimeter wave technology comes in now millimeter wave technology is a type of radar Tech that operates at radio frequencies between 30 and 300 gigahertz it has a unique property it can detect motion position and even Vital Signs such as breathing and heartbeat all in real time without direct line of sight millimeter wave presence sensors work by transmitting a low power radio wave and then capturing the reflected waves off objects in the environment so this would be considered an active sensor as it transmits a signal and then detects the reflection now when these waves encounter a change in the environment say a person entering the room they bounce back differently this change in The Reflex waves is what the sensor actually detects then Advanced algorithms interpret this change to determine whether an object or person is present now these sensors can operate in any lighting condition through certain types of materials and are not affected by environmental factors like dust and smoke so now that we know the basics let's take a look at the features of the fp2 now before we take a look at the features if you've watched this channel before you might have noticed that my basement is finally finished we finally got the work all done last month but there's still a ton of tech for me to install and set up so keep your eye out on the channel for upcoming videos on setting up my smart audio visual lighting and more and if you missed the introduction video I've got a link right up here to show you kind of the overview of what our plan was for this basement of course if you're new please make sure you're subscribed for more great content and if you've gotten some useful information out of this video please give it a thumbs up now let's check out the features of the fp2 so first thing when we crack open the box you'll notice the sensor now what's unique about this sensor is it actually comes with a pre-installed articulating Mount kind of similar to the wise cameras and it actually is magnetic just like the wise cameras as well so you have a lot of flexibility on where you can install this an installation is key because of different installation locations have different features we'll go into that here a little bit later the next thing is a six foot usb-a to USBC cable now this sensor is not battery powered it does require constant power being applied to the sensor so keep that in mind we also get a little pack with a metal disc inside again used for mounting and a small adhesive disk that's used in conjunction with the sensor to allow you to stick it on the wall where you want it it also comes with some basic mounting hardware in case you want to use that method as well and a quick start guide now previously I've mentioned that this is not a battery-powered sensor so you will need to provide USB power to the device at all times it does run off of a standard 5 volt 1 amp USB connection and does not include a charging brick in the box so you need to provide your own charging brick like from a phone charger just make sure it's one amp because that's required and unfortunately the fp2 flat will not work with any PD style charger so keep that in mind make sure you're using an old style USB a wall charger I feel like this might be a small Miss on a car's part because it might confuse people if they plug it into the wrong style Charger now here's a quick tip if you do want to mount it somewhere far away from an outlet like in a ceiling or a wall you might want to look at using a USB C power over ethernet adapter then you can just run an ethernet cable to that location connect it to the adapter and connect the adapter to the acara fp2 this way you can power your device from a Poe switch or an injector now for connection this of course uses Wi-Fi so we're not looking at a zigbee Z-Wave or any other style here it uses Wi-Fi and just 2.4 gigahertz 802.11 b g and N Style Wi-Fi so keep that in mind five gigahertz is not supported it of course also has onboard Bluetooth in use for setting up the device the first time now if you care the radar frequency this particular device uses is 60 to 64 gigahertz even though this is an indoor sensor it actually has an IP X5 rating which means it can be used in high humidity environments like bathrooms or even outdoor as long as it's under an eave and it won't receive direct water on it so keep that in mind this does not mean this is waterproof or water resistant it just means it can be placed in a humid environment where direct water spray will not hit it because of course the port on the back is not waterproof also make sure if you're using Outdoors that you're using an appropriately rated USB power adapter now it does have a temperature range from 14 degrees Fahrenheit to 104 degrees Fahrenheit so again this is not something you probably want to use Outdoors but if you're going to use it in something like a bathroom then you won't have to worry about the device getting damaged because of warmer temperatures or high humidity now before I did mention that you do have multiple Mount options there's quite a bit of flexibility with the built-in ounce but there are two distinct mounting styles that you need to be aware of one is mounting it flat to a wall and the other one is ceiling mounts the reason why this is important is because there are some features that are only available when the device is mounted to a wall and there are some features that are only available when it's mounted at the ceiling we'll go over that here in just a second now this device has 120 degrees of sensing which means it's not a full 180 degrees left to right it has more of a cone out the front so keep that in mind if you mount it to a flat wall so down here in my basement I'm mounting it to this back wall over here which should get most of the rest of the room except for the Nook over here so I'm looking for some alternative mounting methods right now now when you do mount to the wall you get access to the Zone features what this means is you can carve your room up into 30 individual zones each of these zones can be used to trigger an Automation and this even passes through to other devices that you connect which we'll talk about in a second now the maximum sensing area or room coverage is about 340 square feet and again to use the Zone features the wall mount is required now let's talk about the other mounting method ceiling mounting now when you do the ceiling mounted method you lose out on those Zone features but you do gain one additional feature and this is fall detection so say if you wanted to install this in an elderly family member's bedroom you could know if they've fallen off the bed and are on the ground this is great for Elder Care and aging in place so again depending on how you mount it you get different features and it actually knows when you set it up it'll tell you which mode it's in and advise you on what features are available when you're using the app now this has an ultra high precision sensor that can actually detect up to five people in a room at a time and locate them individually on a map now I have noticed this gets a little buggy if you go over three people so the rating on the website actually says three people's about the average but it can detect up to five so you can have your automations running depending on where a person is sitting in a room now because of that high accuracy there are chances of getting some interference and when you take the device through the setup process it'll actually detect things in your room that might give off interference one of the things that I've noticed that gives off interference are my wireless chargers it seems to find those and Blacklist them automatically which is pretty cool now on top of all the presence detection it also has a light sensor on board so you can use this in conjunction with different lighting platforms to give you a custom scene depending on the time of day or the amount of light in the room which is pretty cool now along with just using it as a standalone device you can also use it with an acara hub for additional automations or apple homekit Google Assistant Amazon Alexa or IFTTT and if you use it with homekit you can actually integrate it directly with home assistant because it is a network device so that's pretty cool and that's what I've got mine set up with right now and it's super responsive and if you are using either the acara Hub or home kit all your automations will run locally meaning that the detection will still work even if your internet is down of course your Wi-Fi needs to be up but if your Cloud connection is down you can still run local based automations on those two platforms all right that's it for the features on paper let's actually get it set up and you can see those features in action now I've already covered the two main methods of mounting this device on the wall or on the ceiling you can either do that by putting the adhesive disc on the back of the metal plate and sticking it where you want it or you can use the included Hardware to screw it directly onto a spot on your wall or ceiling of course remember you're going to need to be able to run power to this location in my case I'm going to end up punching a small hole in my wall and running the cord back through there to an outlet behind that wall if you have a more difficult location see my earlier comments about a Poe splitter you can also set this up on a counter or a flat surface by utilizing the built-in stand this is a good temporary installation location and something if you're testing it before you actually stick something to your wall or drill a hole now if you do want to mount it into the corner I mentioned before I found a great 3D printable corner mount from printables user zazzy now I've got a link to it down here and in the description below now other reviewers have said the corner mount is probably the ideal location because you get maximum range the only problem is the app doesn't support it necessarily so when you're looking at the Grid it's a little off that the grid shows your sensor in the middle and not in the corner but I've heard they're going to be releasing a firmware update soon to allow you to move the sensor to the corner of the grid for easier setup all right with that out of the way let's get the device set up in the app so of course you're going to need to have an acara home app installed and also an account setup so once you're logged into your app all you have to do is hit the plus button in the top right hand corner and say add accessory then under sensor you can select acara fp2 if it doesn't show up you might need to update your car app so we're going to select the sensor now once you've plugged the device into your supplied power brick then you're going to need to let the device power up you want the light on top to be flashing yellow if it's not you're going to need to reset the device so to reset the device hold down the reset button on the top for five seconds once the device is flashing yellow you can proceed so it's going to scan and find the device so we're going to select it and then we're going to set up our Wi-Fi again remember 2.4 gigahertz only No 5 gig now if you're on Android you might get a little prompt at the bottom to indicate it's going to connect to the device go ahead and hit connect and once the device is connected the light on the device should flash blue and it should say successful in the app now of course you can give it a name and assign it to a location now before we set everything up you are required to use the acara app to admit actually set up the device get it on your Wi-Fi and Define your zones after that you can use it with in conjunction with one of the other platforms we talked about before but you will need the a car app to make any zone changes so just keep that in mind before we continue to setup make sure you have the sensor approximately where you're going to want to have it permanently installed there's no system going through all the Zone setup until you actually have it where you want it so once we click on the device it's going to take us through the setup wizard so first it'll automatically detect which mode you have the device in if by chance it doesn't detect it you can manually set it to either wall mounted or ceiling mounted and then it's going to have you walk around the room so you can figure out where the edges of your room are because you may have a room that's smaller than the detection area once you go through the automated setup it's going to go ahead and figure out where the edges of your room are and any interference locations again if it's incorrect you can always go back and modify it later on I've got mine set up right now as a blank canvas so this is the Zone management screen on here is where you can add individual zones that'll show up as individual sensors you can also deploy templates but I recommend just doing it from scratch you can add stickers which will allow you to Define certain areas of the room like where your couch is or things like that it's just more for visual it doesn't actually affect the sensor itself so if you wanted to create a Zone you could just click on new Zone and then you're going to draw on the grid where that zone is so I typically recommend walking through the different areas of your room and then go from corner to corner and then Mark those area and fill in the rest of it as each zone of course a Zone has to be square or L-shaped but you can go around here different areas in your room and Define different zones now I would say use the minimum number of zones as possible meaning there's more chances of you sliding out into another Zone and maybe the detection automation you set up won't be correct now for each Zone you can define the color you can define whether it's a detection Zone an entrance zone or an interference Zone again if you have find areas where you're getting false positives where it shows a person is there and there's nobody there you can mark this as an interference Zone and it will ignore it entirely you can add some metadata for type if you would like and you can also change the monitoring sensitivity of that area from low to high depending on if you end up getting false positives in that area of course you can tap on the pencil icon to change the name of the zone so going back to the main menu for the fp2 at the top we're going to see the live view of the room so right now there's just me in the room I've got no zones set up but here in a second you'll see what a fully laid out room looks like you can also get back to the installation mode where if you wanted to change the way you have it installed you can go back into Zone management to add or remove zones then if you click below that it'll show you the history of whether a detected presence in the room or not this is the global sensor so if there is somebody in any of the zones or detected at all in the room it'll show this one as on or off this is great because you can set up automations where if somebody's in the room at all or if they're in a specific zone so very flexible then below that you'll see the illuminum and sensor you can of course click on this and it will show you the different Illumination in the room based on the time of day then as you click on the three dots it'll take you into the device settings you can change the device cards which are specific to the car app which I'm not really going to use that much here you can change the function setting which will turn on and off the light if you want and I could do not disturb mode change the detection type the sensitivity the proximity distance and the fall detection sensitivity these are all things you're going to play around with to get your device set for your room now one thing I will note is as a return to absence sensor this is great if you leave the room and you notice that there's still things being detected you can use this to clear that out and it will kind of learn to see where those problem areas are if you do continue to have presence detected while you're out of the room and there's nobody in the room then you might need to go in and set up interference zones then of course at the bottom our device information like Network information firmware information things like that and you probably will have a firmware update right out of the box I've already applied mine at the bottom you can also remove the accessory if you need to delete it in factories so now that we have everything set up in the akar app now we can set it up with your smart home system of choice now if you're going to be using this with the Google Assistant Alexa or IFTTT you're going to actually set up the integration via the car integration on that particular platform so that means those devices are all going to be utilizing the car Cloud so if your internet's down those won't work but if you want to use homekit that will be local and compatible with home assistance so if you're going to set this up with homekit it's just like any other homekit device you take your iOS device add a new device scan the QR code on the back of the fp2 and then follow the instructions to get it added into homekit again you're going to want to utilize the car app to add zones and make settings to the actual device then you're going to see those zones reflected in homekit now for home assistant the same process is true except for when you do connect to the device except for you're going to see it automatically take detected in your settings and Integrations page it should show up in the top left hand corner it's going to ask you to set it up and then provide the pin number below the QR code type that in and then it will be added and connected into home assistant and again all of your sensors will be replicated into home assistant now you'll notice that the names don't come over so you're going to have to go in order that you created those zones so you might have to play with this a little bit to figure out which zone number is the Zone you've created unless you just did it you probably know the order that you put it in now if we look at the home assistant integration we'll see that we get the master Zone which is basically if there's any motion detected or any presence detected in that particular area or we have each individual zone so again you're going to have two sensors on at a time you're going to have the specific Zone the person's in and you're going to have the global one so you can have automation set up on either one of them you also get the aluminum sensor brought through to home assistant as well so now you can set up your automations to be based off a person entering the zone and unlike your passive infrared sensors you don't have to have any additional logic if a person is in that zone that zone is going to stay on so you can just have it when that zone turns off that's when the person leaves so that's pretty cool and that makes this completely different than all other sensors on the market now the fp2 is priced at 84 U.S now this is higher than most motion or presence sensors by quite a bit however it's important to note this sensor can actually replace a large number of additional sensors you might need for a larger open room which ultimately might save you money in the long run additionally the sensor is built with advanced technology that ensures greater accuracy and reliability making it more powerful than most other sensors on the market and when you compare it with other millimeter wave sensors it's definitely on the high side versus tuya and the presence One sensor however if it does feature use case I think it's worth your investment now let's look at the pros real quick this is going to be great in large open rooms and can do different automations based on where you are in the room plus because it's millimeter wave it can detect somebody even if they're sleeping lying down or sitting in a chair it's also packed with multiple features it can detect many people in a room it's got a wide range of sensing area you can do automation is based on location and more also it's got a light sensor on board which most of the our car motion sensors have but it's still a plus that it's got that on board and of course because it is powered from your AC Mains there's no batteries to worry about but on the con side you actually have to use AC power so your installation location is pretty limited to somewhere close to power or where you want to run cable of course another con is the price this isn't something that you're going to be buying probably for every single room in your house nor is it actually designed for that it's probably better to focus on larger open rooms for this type of sensor another disadvantage is some of the features are still buggy multi-person detection isn't really that reliable it can detect multiple people in a room but sometimes I get duplication because it's reflecting off of a surface so it really depends on your setup whether this is actually usable or not also it's accessible to interference so do take it through the setup process and make sure you do zone out those areas that do cause interference as I said before this sensor at its price point is definitely overkill for smaller rooms now overall the sensor is truly remarkable for its ability to excel in specific use cases particularly in large open rooms with as advanced technology it has the power to completely revolutionize the way that you create your automations and because it's durable and has some Environmental Protection it should continue to perform in any room in your house for years to come all in all I do truly believe the sensor does live up to its Game Changer status in the world of Smart Home Tech and I'm sure if set up correctly it'll make a significant impact on the way you approach your smart home and its automations now if you'd like to pick up one of these as of the release of this video in early August 2023 they are actually in stock on Amazon and if you want to support the Channel please use the links down in the description it means a lot and lets a car know that you came from my channel and of course if you have any questions please leave a comment down below or jump on our Discord server I try to answer each and everyone's questions again I want to thank acara for sponsoring this and my u100 lock video if you missed that awesome smart deadbolt you can check out the video right up here now if you'd like to see some examples of powerful home assistant based automations and how to set them up check out this playlist right here and as always if you haven't already please make sure you subscribe for more smart home tech review in projects by clicking right over here thank you again and I'll see you on the next video

Channel: This Smart House

Views: 46,178

Keywords: presence sensor, smart home, aqara fp2, aqara presence sensor, home automation, aqara fp2 sensor, aqara smart home, home assistant, aqara mmwave, aqara motion sensor, aqara review, aqara fp2 review, smart home ideas, smart presence sensor, aqara fp2 presence sensor

Id: YPLpBSzpjVk

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2023