Are any of you using PIR sensors outside, with permanent power? Preferably mains (230v).
Or, have you modified existing mains pir devices to add z-wave functionality e.g. adding a Z-Wave Fibaro Universal Sensor.
I have been running my openHAB for quite some time, and all is good. The only issue I have, is with a Aeon Labs 4 in 1 gen5 sensor. The thing is run on batteries, and has a mind of it’s own.
My goal is to have a PIR sensor to detect movement in my driveway. However the Aeon sensor is too unstable, and eats batteries too quickly. I moved my controller (z-stick s2) in close range of the sensor as my other devices would not relay messages from it. Probably because they are not gen5.
Any ideas on a device that would satisfy my needs?
I am using a couple of the Fibaro Universal Sensors inside my legacy house alarm panel, to allow my to monitor the 3 PIRs I have around the house. Works very well and the sensors happily run off the alarms 12V supply.
I don’t have any outside, but I would suggest using an off-the shelf external PIR which is purpose built/designed for that job. Then chuck one of the Fibaro Universal Sensors and away you go.
I have been thinking about the purpose build outdoor sensor as a solution.
However, I cannot figure out how to get 12volt to the Fibaro sensor. Any ideas?
Why don’t you simply attach the Aeon sensor to mains power?
(from your post, it sounds as if you have mains available where you want the sensor to be).
Just open it and attach the USB cable below the battery holding brackets.
Now if running mains-powered, the Aeon is much more reliable than it is in battery-powered mode. Radio range improves, just try if that’s sufficient.
I think I will give that a go.
I pulled the sensor indoors last night, where it acted nicely. Sending temperature and detecting motion. So I figured it could have been a range issue.
Therefore I installed the sensor outside again, and moved the controller to literally the inside of the wall on which the sensor is mounted. Distance 1meter.
I triggered the motion once, which worked nicely. However, after that, nothing has been coming in from the device.
I am going to try the mains power thing, and do a “will it blent” if that does not work.
This has to be the worst device ever made.
Yes, I had exactly the same issues and that’s what I observed and thought, too. Also tried that 1m-distance thing myself.
As I don’t have mains where I would need it, I switched to a Philio sensor. Both, Philio and Fibaro, are much better w.r.t. radio. Fortunately I was still able to return the Aeon.
I can’t promise that attaching to mains WILL help (so don’t get any electrician to install a new line before you tried), but as some people reported this it’s worth a try. You can still switch to another sensor if it doesn’t solve your problem.
(btw: unlike battery powered devices, you can actually poll mains-powered ones, so you should be able to reliably determine its radio ‘reachability’ using zwave stats items or simply using habmin, showing some stats such as number of lost packets)
Markus
PS: then again, I bought a new one Aeon multisensor for indoor use. But the new 6-in-1 is ZWave Plus, so it should have better radio, and also I’ll run it mains-powered.
I am going to make an ad hoc test, and see if that helps, before trying to figure out a permanent solution, involving a 5/10m usb cable…
Actually I just had a look in HABmin, and I can see that the main controller is not a neighbour to the sensor. So even if the controller is close to the sensor, I guess it will still try and talk to the known neighbours. So having a working sensor yesterday, was probably not because the sensor was inside next to the controller, but because it was actually closer to the known neighbours.
Well, that’s another story then. Neighbourship handling is not specific to the Aeon sensor. The zwave controller takes care of organizing the zwave mesh. Typically, it initiates a ‘network heal’ automatically once a day, but that doesn’t work well with battery powered devices as they need to be awake at the time of reorganization, and you can’t wake them up by software (just by pushing the hardware button).
From habmin, you can initiate a ‘heal’ per-node or for the complete network.
Note there’s a parameter in the Aeon to stay alive after startup for some minutes even if running on battery. Useful to have that active while playing around with the mesh heal.
