Saturday Spotlight: Aqara FP2 Prescence Sensor

Well done folks, you made it through another week and you know what that means. Spotlight Saturdays. Today we will be looking at the Aqara FP2 mWave Presence Sensor. I am not going to lie to you and say that this is the best Presence senor that I have ever tried. But this is the only Presence sensor I have ever tried. And to be honest, I am incredible impressed. The reaction time on the sensor is around the same as the it's passive infrared counter parts, however the feature that it can track which room I am in is incredible. 

We have this so that the Living Room and Dining Room Lighting turns on individually depending on the room that you are based on (you do have to set this up using the Aqara app, but then each zone creates it's own entity on Home Assistant for your automations. 

I have not managed to try the ceiling mount features just yet, but I am planning on purchasing an additional one of these for use in my bedroom. Apparently you can track your sleep on using this, which I would be very interested in finding out how well this works. 

My two gripes with this project, we are so spoilt with everything being wireless that the cabling can be slightly difficult to hide. Especially with the USB C cable that comes with the sensor being 1m, I had to use a different cable I had, but sadly that was Black and much harder to hide. Thankfully I have managed to hide the cabling relatively well so it looks quite clean. 

My other is that the price. I bought it on sale so it was roughly £60, but normally it is up for sale on amazon for £90. I understand this is new tech and hopefully the price shall start to come down as these become more popular, but really, £90 compared to a £15 Zigbee motion sensor. I could almost create an automation that worked as a presence sensor with 4 of these and it would still only be equal to the sale price.

TL;DR: The FP2 Presence sensor is definitely a neat piece of kit, the price currently is quite high, but I would be lying if I didn't already have a plan for my next one.