I have the matter integration working with my G410 Doorbell camera. I ahve added multiple signals to matter including the doorbell ringing and lingering. The problem is that these signals are exposed to matter as occupancy sensors, but they are behaving only like buttons. What I mean is that the ‘occupancy’ for the signal is only triggered for a brief instance when the event begins, but does not stay ‘occupancy detected’ during the full event. The occupancy should remain detected for the full duration that the camera/doorbell detect a person.
14 Likes
I ran into the same issue in the past.
What you’re describing is pretty common with Matter occupancy sensors that are really doorbell/motion events underneath — they pulse instead of holding state.
Don’t fight it at the sensor level; in HA I’d wrap it in a simple timer helper so ‘occupied’ sticks around for however long you actually need it to.
6 Likes
Thanks @Outburstin - This is what I was planning to do in the interim, but Aqara obviously understands occupancy sensors (they have pretty good stand-alone ones), so they should expose them properly. Not to mention the fact that a battery level is exposed as an occupancy sensor… Seems a little like lazy development.
7 Likes
Interested in what you are using as a platform are you full relying on Aqara or ingesting the Sensors in HomeAssistant (for example) ?
3 Likes
Thanks @CyCLoNe - I am using HomeAssistant. I was expecting that Aqara would send a true Occupancy Detected state change when the lingering is detected, and only change the state back to not-detected when the lingering is no longer detected. But instead it sends the the state on then off nearly immediately. It also uses the same occupancy type for all signals.
4 Likes
I’m interested in this also for a similar implementation scenario.
4 Likes
I’ve integrated my G410 with Home Assistant via HomeKit, and I’m also using Matter signals for facial recognition.
Since the HomeKit connection includes the G410’s motion detection as an entity, it is possible to combine the occupancy sensor via Matter and the motion sensor via HomeKit into a single automation. This should enable you to detect how long an event lasts. For example, you could use it to detect how long a person stays after ringing the doorbell. Since the HomeKit connection also includes the doorbell (ring) as an entity, you actually no longer need the Matter signal.
For lingering detection, however, I would still combine the Matter signal with the motion sensor via HomeKit, since the motion sensor also reacts to small movements or changes in light. The combination of AI detection via the Matter signal and the highly sensitive motion sensor via HomeKit should actually work well.
6 Likes
@JohnD - Thank you kindly for the detailed information. Part of my recent journey has been to move off of HomeKit, but I see that it does offer quite a lot of the camera integration benefits. I will try out this route!
2 Likes
I had the same problem.
In my setup, the Aqara Matter signal for the G410 sometimes appeared as a very short occupancy pulse, and HA did not always update the binary sensor reliably.
I built a small HACS custom integration for this:
It listens directly to the raw Matter occupancyChanged event and exposes it as a proper Home Assistant ring event, plus custom bus events for compatibility.
That has been more reliable for me than depending only on the Aqara Matter signal binary sensor as my automations now listen to both these “signals” and the binary_sensor from Aqara/Matter (whichever is received first).
My only issue left is slow snapshot creation through go2rtc, which seems unrelated.
5 Likes