Aqara FP400 – Early Impressions & Real-World Use

Developer Hub
1

I’ve been lucky enough to get an Aqara FP400 early to test, so I thought I’d share how I’ve been using it and how I’ve found it so far.

I’ve got mine paired with an M3 Hub and installed in my living room. It’s probably the busiest room in the house, so it seemed like a good place to put it through its paces.

Setup was pretty straightforward. I mapped out the room in the Aqara app and created a zone around the sofa. This is probably my favourite thing about the FP400 so far – it doesn’t just know someone is in the room, it knows where they are.

I’ve used that to create an automation where, if someone is on the sofa and the light level drops below 50 lux, the living room lights come on. If nobody is detected in the room for 10 minutes, they switch back off.

So far it’s been really reliable. Detection is quick and I haven’t had the lights going off while someone is still sitting on the sofa, which is exactly what I wanted from it.

I’ve also been playing with the directional detection. I have an entrance into the living room that we use when coming home, so at night, if the FP400 detects someone entering from that direction, it turns the light on. Again, it’s been surprisingly reliable.

I’ve run the AI Spatial Learning as well. I can’t say I noticed any obvious difference afterwards, but to be fair I wasn’t having any detection issues beforehand.

Overall, I’m really impressed so far. What I like most is being able to make automations based on what’s happening in different parts of one room, rather than just “someone is here”.

I’ve still got more I want to try, particularly multiple people, sitting completely still for longer periods and getting it into Apple Home through the M3.

If anyone has anything specific they’d like me to test while I’ve got it, let me know!

2 Likes
3

@tim_rudge Thanks for sharing your early impressions—sounds like the FP400 is already earning its keep in your living room! The zone-based automation around the sofa is a great example of how mmWave presence sensing moves beyond basic motion detection. Keeping the lights on while someone’s sitting still is exactly the kind of real-world reliability that makes or breaks a presence sensor.

A couple of thoughts on your setup:

  • Multiple people & stillness: The FP400 should handle multi-target tracking, so it’ll be interesting to see how it copes with two people on the sofa and minimal movement. If you do hit any false negatives, running another round of AI Spatial Learning might help—it’s designed to adapt to your specific environment, even if the first pass seemed invisible.

  • Apple Home via M3: Since the M3 acts as a Matter bridge, you should be able to expose the FP400 to Apple Home once that integration is enabled. Worth checking if the FP400 shows up as individual zones or just a single presence sensor in HomeKit—could affect how you build automations there.

  • Directional detection: Love the entrance trigger idea. If you ever get false activations from other movement in the room, tweaking the zone boundaries or sensitivity might help refine it.

Would love to hear how the multi-person and stillness tests go—those are the scenarios that really stress-test presence sensors. Keep us posted