The basic sensor has temp, humidity, tilt and a beeper all in a 41mm square 700ft range (so they say), year+ battery life and its user changeable. Config is done by a web interface with upload to cloud but most importantly they have an option to post data to a local URL. I’m not a fan of relying on external services as you never know when failure could happen…
I have been looking for something like this for a while, so i have some on order for testing. I have some z-wave stuff just cant seem to get it to work for me.
Anyone have any thoughts or has looked at these? Many ways of getting the data into openhab (my personal favourite atm is using MQTT)
“You can define a custom URL (such as REST endpoint of home automation systems) to be called on each type of event for each tag individually or all tags. Each URL may include placeholders such as “{0}” or “{1}” to be replaced with specific information from each event. With home automation systems such as Universal Devices Insteon/ISY or Phillips Hue Lamps that supports HTTP based API, you can turn on light when door is opened, or motion is detected,”
I was thinking about bouncing it into MQTT via NodeRed.
I currently use NodeRed to handle getting the temp ect from my Tado smart heating controls.
Indeed as mentioned below I use these sensors throughout my house and find them excellent. I’ve got a few PIR+temp+RH sensors, a few motion+temp+RH sensors (like in the YouTube video), a Lux+temp+RH sensor and a moisture+temp sensor at the moment (as well the the Tag Manager that manages them all).
I find they occasionally need their battery reseated, but only if they are in a place of max movement (e.g. on a keyring). Presently my coldest one monitors my freezer, and routinely handles -13C (8.6F).
The tag manager just handles all the sensor comms, I assume so the sensors can get the good battery life my minimising comms overhead.
I’ve found it works well for event notifiers to my local OH 1.8 instance (I’ve heard it’s problematic with OH2 because they no longer honour REST GET requests?) and it works fine for passing temperature, relative humidity etc data however you have to let it send the sensor data to their cloud service and request it from there (not ideal in my mind).
Well all being good i could have mine within the next 2 weeks, confirmed shipping today.
I ordered:
Wireless Sensor Tag Pro
Wireless Sensor Tag Pro ALS
Reed KumoSensor
PIR KumoSensor
Ethernet Tag Manager
Worst case somebody has already writen a NodeRed package to work with them.
Hmm, that node red thing looks interesting. Winner if it can also map and transform flows between web services too ?
Also re the range of the sensors, my furthest from the tag manager is about 20m away in a metal freezer thru many walls and works fine. Indeed one time the kids threw one over the fence without telling me but I rescued oh it by tracking the sound
I have mine pulling information regarding my heating (Tado) on a API style call from there cloud services, it spits out JSON that is transformed in my case into MQTT messages thrown into openhab that way.
Just checked the tracking of the package and its hit the UK today. Unsure if its made it though customs as yet. Should have them before the end of the week, looking forward to the weekend to play with them.
Still holding back on moving to OH2 at the moment, mostly as it seems alot of hassle to redo what i have already running. On the flip side i still have alot of things to add in to the current system that are tested and working fine so i think i will have to make the jump at the same time as adding these in.
Well i am happy to report that my sensors are here and finally setup (life always gets in the way).
I have managed to link them into Openhab via NodeRed using the URL call feature for temp, humidity and also motion detection.
I have also managed to get the sensors to arm and disarm via NodeRed on motion detection (sensor movement and PIR detection). Also reporting sensor data to OpenHab.
The arming and disarming of sensors is via their cloud services.
The cloud services have been stable so far, im unsure if the url calls would function without the cloud service working. I might have to test it.
I must say the hardware is impresive in build, sometimes the sensors can be a little slow to respond when changing settings, i put this down to their low powered hardware ect.
The big question, having used them do i think they are worth it?
They are well priced and easy to tie into other technologies. Reliability and battery life i wont know about for a while, but im planning on buying more.
I’m interested in that aspect too. I recently had a broadband modem bricked by a lightning strike. Although I replaced it within a day it would have been a hassle if sensors or other devices stopped working during that time.
I’m interested as well, as while I can do event notifiers with a local URL call I couldn’t see a way to get the latest temperature/humidity data from the sensors with a local URL call.
I’ve found their PIR motion detection can be a bit slow at times (many seconds), however otherwise my only gripe is that the older sensors (a few years old) seem to get less reliable (they drop off the network and need battery reseating to be brought back to life for another few days - and that’s with good batteries)
Ok, it was a bit delayed but i have managed to test it.
I have managed to make the change to OpenHAB 2 and get these working as i expected to and they are working very well.
I have used the URL call feature to pass the data into NodeRed which then passes it into OpenHAB via MQTT, i’m sure it could be done directly but that’s over my coding grade.
Sadly the URL calls stop working when the cloud access drops out which would be a bit of a deal breaker for me if i didn’t have a redundant internet connection i’m working on.
