Anyone who has both would recommend the FP300 as a purchase? Whats your experience?
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I only have the FP300, but I’ve done my research before buying it so I’ll tell you what I know and maybe someone who has both can confirm or correct me.
The FP300 is a dual sensor device - PIR (the good old infrared, like in motion sensors) and mmWave. It uses PIR to “wake up” because it works passively and uses mmWave as a measure of making sure there’s actually someone in the room. It has some false positives, like when you’re cooking/baking and there’s heat, but generally with its AI detection with time it becomes reliable. But sometimes its response is slower, because it learns to ignore some movement.
The best thing about it is: it’s battery powered and somewhat reliable. It’s great for small and medium sized rooms, where you just want to replace a motion detector with something that won’t turn off your light when you’re standing still.
The FP2 only uses the mmWave so it continuously uses the ultrasound to check for presence. It won’t be fooled by heat, but it still may be fooled by moving particles. It can detect up to 5 people (the FP300 only shows if there’s anyone, it doesn’t know how many people), it can differentiate between people and pets and it has fall detection. And it can split the room into detection areas, and you can make automations based on where a person is (for example: if someone’s on the couch, you dim the lights, if someone starts walking through other areas, the lights get brighter). And it needs to be plugged into power (any USB power source will do).
It’s best for bigger rooms, but it more difficult to setup
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I have both. In my experience the FP2 is tricky to get going but you can do zones and multi person detection. I setup the fp300 and it is solid. Aside from the extras like lux, temp/humidity the presence detection is perfect. I love that I don’t have to have it wired making placing it easy. Please feel free to follow up with any questions you may have.
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I have not the FP2 but the FP1E and five FP300 sensors. Though I do live alone with just a cat, so it’s not the most complex scenario.
Most of my existing PIR motion sensors were placed to detect movement in a fairly narrow space, such as hallways and entryways. And I kept adding them over time to try to get them to be more accurate. But the issue with false positives (probably due to heat sources) remained.
The FP1E does a good job at tracking occupancy/presence over a duration of time, at least for a single person. Enough that I could likely use that alone to determine when the room is empty. If I had an easy way to route power to all of them, I’d definitely choose it over the FP300.
The obvious strong point to the FP300 is that it’s battery powered. However when I tried to use the FP300 sensors to track occupancy for an entire room in the same way, I noticed either it would get stuck, or clear signs that it was operating in a way that the batteries would die quickly. I reconfigured and positioned them to behave more so at detecting presence at a point in time, and especially near the rooms’ entryways like the existing PIR sensors I have. That strategy accomplished what I still needed in essentially as a very accurate motion/presence sensor.
Really wish they designed the FP300 to take CR123 batteries. A single CR123 still has more capacity than both of the CR2450 that seem to be wired in parallel, and is either cheaper or about the same cost as one of them. It was a lot smaller than I expected it to be and I would have been fine if it were a bit larger in order to accommodate the CR123.
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Really like my FP2. Have it setup spanning across living room and kitchen. Mapping out the zones was fairly simple and once setup was complete it’s been very hands off device. Works a lot better than my traditional PIR motion sensors, but unfortunately don’t have the fp300 for a direct comparison
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