I would like to set up a sensor that would notify me if my dog goes upstairs while I’m at work. We have an Aqara camera hub set up in the livingroom where the dog is and the stairway is in that room as well. Sometimes the dog goes upstairs to make a mess when we aren’t home and we don’t find out until later because the upstairs isn’t used much. Does anyone have suggestions for an Aqara product that might work for this situation?
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I would think the FP300 presence sensor would work for this. I have one, but it’s not installed yet. With PIR and mmWave, it seems like this would detect your pet. I will have the opposite problem when I install mine. I don’t want it to detect our dogs.
While not an Aqara product, the Furbo cameras are excellent at detecting pets and even differentiating which pet is which. Unfortunately, it requires a subscription and there is minimal smart home integration.
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@xntrik you might be able to do this with what you already have, then add a cheap sensor if not.
Option 1: the camera you already own. Since the stairs are in view of the living room camera, check whether your model supports pet detection and detection zones. If it does, draw a zone over the stairs only and set a pet-detected-in-zone notification. No new hardware. The catch is that a zone on the stairs will also fire when the dog just walks past the bottom step, so draw it on the upper steps if you can.
Option 2: a motion sensor at the top of the stairs. A basic Aqara motion sensor (P1 or P2) on the upstairs landing is the most reliable signal: if it sees motion up there, the dog made it upstairs. Mount it low-ish and aimed at the landing, since a dog is much shorter than the person the sensor is designed for. Motion is actually the right tool here (not presence): you want to know the moment something moves up there, not whether someone is sitting still.
Either way, add one condition: only alert when nobody is home (away mode, or phones not home). Otherwise you’ll get a notification every time someone in the family goes upstairs.
And @tennvol88’s point cuts the other way for you: this is one of the rare cases where you want the sensor to see the dog.
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Thank you @paulcampanelli99 Option 1 isn’t practical due to the layout of the living room and placement of the camera. Option 2 is promising though
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Glad option 2 fits. A few things that’ll save you some trial and error:
Test it before you trust it. Before adding the “nobody home” condition, run it for a day or two with the alert going to your phone while you’re home. Walk up the stairs, send the dog up, and make sure it fires every time. It’s much easier to fix the aim now than to find out it missed after the next mess.
Watch what else it can see. Keep it pointed at the floor of the landing, not at a window or down the stairwell, or sunlight and people downstairs can set it off.
Cover the room the dog actually goes to. If the mess always happens in one particular room, a second sensor in that room tells you where the dog is, not just that it went up. The landing sensor catches the trip upstairs; the room sensor confirms it.
I wonder if I could utilize the Door & Window sensor P2 in this scenario as well? We have a blanket that hangs over the stairway entrance, it insulates the main floor from the upstairs. Could the P2 be adapted to detect the blanket being disturbed by the dog?
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