Aqara FP400 3week Review: Incremental Upgrade

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Aqara FP400 Beta Review: Network Freedom, M3 Child Integration, and Real-World Tracking Impressions

Testing Background & Hardware

  • Testing Period: 3 weeks
  • Initial Firmware: 1.1.8.2
  • Form Factor: Identical exterior dimensions to the FP2 (fits right into existing FP2 3D-printed mounts, brackets, and wall cutouts).
  • Test Environments: Living Room and Family Room (tested sequentially as a 1:1 replacement for current FP2 units).

Connectivity & Ecosystem Integration Moving away from the FP2’s notoriously painful Wi-Fi onboarding is the standout win here. Both Thread and Zigbee offer clear paths forward, depending on what you want exposed to your smart home:

  • Direct Matter over Thread: Onboarding directly in the Aqara app over Thread was instant. However, pairing directly via Matter into third-party platforms like Home Assistant currently only exposes standard core entities (the illuminance/light sensor and overall room presence), leaving out multi-target coordinates and discrete zones.
  • Zigbee to Hub M3 → Home Assistant (The Sweet Spot): Pairing via Zigbee requires modern hardware (it refused older legacy Aqara hubs and wanted the Hub M3). But once paired to the M3, the FP400 automatically surfaced in Home Assistant as a child device of the M3. This brought in the individual configured zones cleanly without any of the old FP2 headaches - no HomeKit Controller workarounds, unpairing loops, or messy bridge sharing just to get zones recognized.
  • Regardless of the path you choose, bypassing 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi pairing eliminates a massive point of friction.

Setup, Mapping & Mounting Flexibility

  • Room Mapping & Zone Creation: When not migrating an existing profile, mapping out the room from scratch is intuitive, clean, and straightforward. Creating custom detection zones follows the familiar, proven process from the FP2 app interface.
  • Template Backwards Compatibility: If you are swapping out an FP2, you don’t have to start from scratch. Importing existing room templates and zone layouts carried over seamlessly without redrawing boundaries.
  • Placement & Height Calibration: The sensor offers noticeable flexibility in where it can be positioned for target tracking. The app now allows you to specify the exact installation height, which goes a long way in helping the radar calculate positioning accurately across different room dynamics.

Radar Tracking, Posture & Detection Performance Day-to-day responsiveness feels slightly snappier than the FP2, but actual positional tracking is more of an incremental revision than a generational leap:

  • Detection Consistency: Variable across rooms. In one space, target tracking was noticeably tighter; in the second room, it occasionally felt less responsive, missing presence where an FP2 had normally caught it.
  • Phantom Presence Bug: Encountered instances where the sensor flagged room presence as active even though individual zone target counts read 0 and the map was completely clear.
  • Pet vs. Human Filtering: Still needs refinement. In the Man Cave setup, the sensor was mounted at the lower end of Aqara’s recommended height envelope, which likely contributed to misses, but the classification logic definitely needs firmware tuning.
  • Missing Features (Posture & Sleep Tracking): Keep in mind that sleep tracking is not included here, so that could not be evaluated. Additionally, posture detection - specifically distinguishing between standing, sitting, and lying down - is noticeably absent on the base FP400. As it turns out, full posture recognition and fall detection are reserved for the upcoming FP400 Pro model.

PROS:

  • Effortless Home Assistant Integration via M3: Pairing via Zigbee to the Hub M3 brings the FP400 and its configured individual zones into HA automatically as child devices.
  • No More Wi-Fi Pairing Woes: Thread and Zigbee eliminate initial Wi-Fi setup headaches and clear 2.4 GHz congestion from your router.
  • Drop-in Physical Replacement: Identical footprint to the FP2, keeping your custom 3D prints, mounts, and wall cutouts fully compatible.
  • Seamless Template Migration & Easy Mapping: Imports existing FP2 room grid layouts right out of the gate, and mapping a room from scratch is simple and intuitive.
  • Flexible Mounting with Height Input: Broad placement options paired with app-level height specification to optimize tracking geometry.
  • Snappier Response Times: Noticeably faster state updates across both Thread and Zigbee connections.

CONS:

  • Direct Matter Over Thread Entity Limits: Pairing directly via Matter currently exposes only basic overall presence and light level, omitting individual zones in third-party platforms.
  • Picky Zigbee Pairing: Requires modern hubs like the Hub M3 and will not pair with older legacy Aqara hubs.
  • No Posture Detection or Sleep Tracking: Lacks standing vs. sitting vs. lying down detection (reserved for the FP400 Pro) and does not support sleep tracking.
  • Incremental Radar Improvements: Core tracking accuracy is roughly on par with the FP2 rather than a massive performance leap.
  • Phantom Presence Bug: Occasional overall occupancy triggers while all zone counts read zero.
  • Pet Detection Needs Work: AI discrimination between pets and people remains hit-or-miss at this firmware stage.

The Verdict If you are shopping for a new mmWave presence sensor, get the FP400. Ditching Wi-Fi onboarding, adding Thread support, intuitive fresh room mapping, and having the Hub M3 cleanly pass individual zones into Home Assistant makes the setup experience vastly superior to the FP2.

However, if you already have dialed-in FP2s, your Wi-Fi isn’t bogged down, and you were hoping for advanced posture detection (standing/sitting/laying down), the tracking performance alone isn’t a mandatory upgrade, and you may want to wait for the FP400 Pro instead.

FP400 Spatial-Multi-Sensor-FP400

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Well said

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Thank you for a very informative and great review on the FP400… looking forward to the FP400 Pro as well. :+1:

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Thanks for your review! I have a number of Aqara FP2’s and FP300. I just got an FP400 this weekend and am very pleased with it. I use both HomeKit and Home Assistant, and one target I strive for is for HomeKit not to be dependent on Home Assistant, and vice-versa. Yeah, I know I can add devices to Home Assistant and expose it from HA to HomeKit, but I prefer that they are not dependent on each other. This was a challenge with FP2. I added my FP2 to HomeKit, but in order for Home Assistant to see the FP2, I had to use the Presence Soft Sensor feature (see What is the Presence Soft Sensor and how to set it up for better automations?) , so HA can see the presence info (plus, the feature allows other devices such as door sensors to weigh in on presence, although for mmWave sensors, door sensors in my experience aren’t that important).

Anyway, I really do like the Zigbee & Matter support of the FP400. I added my FP400 to my Aqara M3 hub via Zigbee. The zones were automatically exported via Matter from the M3 hub to both Home Assistant and HomeKit, which allows HomeKit and HA to be independent of each other.

One tip for Home Assistant users: eachl Aqara zone is exported to HA as a device. In addition to the room-level device (containing occupancy and luminance info), f you have multiple zones defined in Aqara, you will wind up with multiple devices - one HA device per Aqara zone. All the HA devices are named “Spatial Multi-Sensor FP400”, with entities that belong to it for Occupancy, sensitivity, hold time, etc. I renamed my HA devices to be the name of the zones I created in the Aqara app, and then recreated the entity id. Likewise, the M3 exports, via Matter, the Aqara zones to HomeKit, and also calls the Occupancy sensors in HomeKit “Spatial Multi-Sensor FP400”, and I renamed them to match the Aqara zone names.
It would have been nice if the device names were already named after the names used in the Aqara app. I had to go to each zone and then based on its occupancy, rename the devices in HA and HomeKit.

I really wish that posture was supported. I use my FP400 in my Home Theater room. Normally, I want all lights to be off when watching a movie since I use a projector). So, it would have been easy to turn on/off lights depending on if anyone is or is not standing. Without posture detection, I had to create zones for seating and for the floor, and if someone enters the floor zone, then turn on the path lights. But it’s a bit tricky doing this since the floor area is also covered by legs when seats are reclined and leg rests go up.

Overall, I’ve been using the FP400 for 2 days, and it has worked very well for me. I have not gotten ghost/phantom issues yet. Like the FP2, placement is critical. At least with the FP2, fine tuning the placement, even tilt of the sensor, helps minimize or even eliminate ghosting issues. I believe FP400 is supposed to be even less prone to ghosting than the FP2, but placemenbtn is still important. I’ve only used FP2 for 2 days, but so far, I like it. I don’t plan on replacing my FP2s yet, but the FP400 will be my go-to sensor for other rooms (as long as a plug is conveniently located and I need multi-zone support; otherwise FP300 is what I use).

EDIT: I wanted to add - if you were to add a new zone in the Aqara app, the existing zones in Home Assistant are unaffected. Only the new zone is added. However, if you add a new zone in the Aqara app, all the old zones will be deleted from HomeKit and all zones will be resent from the M3 hub to HomeKit.

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Nice. I forgot to mention your point of the individual device rooms in HA. I’m not sure if I prefer that or not, it’s just different and was weird at first.

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Really disappointed that there’s now a pro version coming out. What’s the tentative date on this now?

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Agreed

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Thanks for the write-up. If you import the map that you used for the FP2 before, do the positions actually match on the FP400 or do you have to adjust the map?

Have a look at the following post. You don’t need an Aqara hub to get zones into a third party ecosystem when connected directly via Matter over Thread:

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Thanks! Should have waited for this before investing heavily on fp2 and fp300. Will commission one fp400 and see (zigbee mode to m3 hub)

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Nice. After I had tried Thread and went back to Zigbee I had read elsewhere about the zones working over Matter, and I think what might have happened was I didn’t initially know that Home Assistant separates the zones from Aqara as different devices. They’re not all lumped together like the FP2 when pulled into HA via HomeKit.

Yes using the templates from the FP2 worked perfectly, so all the zones mapped fine etc. Of course you need to perfectly position the FP400 exactly as you did the FP2, but it was simple enough as I had 3D printed a corner mount that it nicely slid into.
It’s definitely a streamlined process as a replacement upgrade device, probably one of the easiest one for one device upgrades I’ve ever experienced as it literally slid into place and worked :slight_smile:

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I had to learn that first when adding FP2 to Home Assistant via the Apple HomeKit integration. Finding the devices aka zones in Home Assistant when all had the same name was a bit annoying but that’s on Home Assistant and in the end it took only a few more minutes for me to sort out the zones and did a proper renaming

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