If your new to automation, the best thing to get started with is the Presence Sensor FP2. I previously used the Phillips Hue Motion Sensor and it worked great but I would have keep waiting my hand for it to know I’m still here. I have this paired with my SmartThings Hub and it’s been great, no more waiving hands. Just sitting there reading and the lights stayed on and after I leave for 10 mins it turns off which was a money saver for me. Too many times my kids forget to turn off the lights and this works well. I’m the middle of the night when I enter the living room the lights just turns on and off after I leave for 10 minutes.
The automation to setup with SmartThings was easy and did not have any issues and automation can easily be setup in the Aquara app and SmartThings.
I setup zones in the app and added the automation in SmartThings. I really like the support too.
Once you get started with that then it’s seamless based on which light would turn on based on different zones.
2 Likes
@sueeng99 Love this write-up—this is exactly where the FP2 shines vs. classic motion sensors: millimeter‑wave radar can keep “presence” even with tiny movements (like reading on the couch), so you don’t have to do the awkward hand-wave to keep lights on.
Your zone-based setup is also a great tip for anyone new to automation. FP2’s zone positioning lets you split one room into multiple areas (up to 30 zones) and build different behaviors depending on where someone is—so “living room entry” lighting and “sofa reading” lighting can be totally different.
For folks who want to replicate what you did, Aqara’s flow is straightforward: once zones are created, you can build automations using Zone Detection → Enter/Leave style triggers (the same logic applies whether you execute it in Aqara Home or mirror it into another platform like SmartThings).
If you’re up for sharing: how did you lay out your zones (sofa vs. doorway), and did you tune the “absence for some time” delay to 10 minutes on purpose for false-off prevention? FP2 supports presence/absence duration conditions per zone, which is perfect for that kind of “lights off after X minutes” money-saver setup.
1 Like