[Canada] Cheap zigbee motion sensors ($14.99 on primecables)

FYI I just saw these on primecables. LivingWise motion sensors for $14.99. I don’t know if this will work with the Zigbee module or zigbee2mqtt.

https://www.primecables.ca/p-362219-lvs-sn10zw-motion-sensor-for-smart-home-system-livingwise-zigbee-hub-required-livingwise

Hmmm, from Specifications on the linked page:

**Warning: This Zigbee sensor is only fully compatible with LivingSmart/LivingWise/Orvibo Zigbee hub, it does not support any other smart home hub or devices.

The module is cheap enough that it may be worth the risk, but on the surface it doesn’t look very promising.

Yeah the price is as cheap as the Xiaomi one; and you likely won’t have to wait for a month of shipping time. I did a quick search this morning, but didn’t see any mentioning of this in openhab forum. These messages are not supposed to be encrypted, so at the very least it should be working with a Zigbee sniffer using zigbee2mqtt. I still don’t have all the hardware for the sniffer yet so I am not getting one now.

ZigBee network traffic is normally encrypted (normally = almost certainly).

The problem with these sort of devices is that where they are normally non-compliant is in the rejoin, and routing parts of ZigBee - they probably use the standard ZCL clusters so can work with the ZigBee binding, but if they aren’t fully compliant to some of the lower level requirements like rejoin, then there will be nothing you can do about it as these functions are solely handled by the firmware in the coordinator.

Thanks for the correction @chris. I saw some plaintext messages in the zigbee2mqtt project, so I was on the wrong assumption that everything is in plaintext. It’s likely that in that project, the software coordinator just decrypts the message and logs them for debugging purpose.

Absolutely - if the device is linked to a coordinator, then the coordinator and the device share the key so the coordinator will provide plain text messages. However if you are sniffing over the air, then this isn’t the case and you need to capture the key exchange to get the keys otherwise everything is encrypted.