I am really struggling with presence detection using an FP300 pointing directly 45 degrees down onto the bed. I must be a sound sleeper because I get periods of up to 40-50 minutes where it says there is no occupancy. Unfortunately this can trigger one of my automations, which determines that there is no one upstairs and everyone is downstairs and therefore will turn on daytime mode automations. So the next time I move in bed, the main light comes on in the room.
Should I give up using a presence detection to determine if someone is in a bedroom, if they might be in bed or asleep,. Or should I try an FP2 as a better solution and would that be more reliable? I don’t necessarily want the expense of an FP2 if it’s going to be no better than the FP300. One benefit of the FP3000 is the lack of a cable run but I could put up with that if I had to.
I think I am going to have to add a explicit button to press when “everyone is awake” to enable upstairs lighting automation, which is a shame as I have no other explicit “mode” buttons.
Maybe we might start seeing reports from the FP400 wider trial as it seems to be coming out of NDA.
The FP2 seems like the better choice since it’s wired and doesn’t have to aggressively save power like the battery-operated FP300. The biggest advantage is being able to create separate zones (like the bed itself vs. the area around it). This lets you build sequential automations in Aqara Home or Home Assistant to trigger different scenes when getting in or out of bed.
The challenge lies in continuous occupancy, or in other words, detecting you while you sleep. From what @siobhanellis said, it doesn’t seem to work well if you are under a blanket. I’m actually a bit surprised by this. I once accidentally left a really thick cat mat right in front of my FP2, and it still detected me without any issues. Because of that, I suspect it’s not the thickness of the fabric, but rather the movement of the blanket that confuses the sensor’s algorithm.
I can’t really judge if the FP2’s dedicated sleep tracking mode solves this. The video I posted claims it works, so maybe that mode uses a different algorithm to handle moving blankets. But I haven’t tested it myself, and it sounds like @siobhanellis hasn’t either, right? On top of that, the sensor has to be mounted at a very specific angle right above the bed for this mode. Plus, I’m not even sure if that specific mode can be used for standard presence automations.
As for the upcoming FP400, it can distinguish between lying, sitting, and standing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it struggles with continuous occupancy too. We’ll just have to wait for the official release to know for sure.
Actually, what you’ve already described should work pretty reliably with a sequential automation anyway! However, if you have specific goals in mind, please let us know. We may be able to find a solution that doesn’t require continuous occupancy detection.
Thanks again John, that does help. It seems like continuous occupancy detection is the big issue and I’m not sure that an FP2 will help here.
I was trying to be quite clever in handling occupancy to determine the mode of lighting automation. When there is no one downstairs and obviously no lights are on downstairs, whenever the last light is manually turned off upstairs, the automations of all the upstairs lights based on the presence sensors get turned off. That way when someone wanders around in the middle of the night, it doesn’t blind them (or anyone else) with the full light.
That night mode gets turned off at 8:00 in the morning unconditionally, which re-enables all the upstairs presence automations for the lighting. What I was trying to do was add a further mechanism for turning that off and re-enabling the presence automations by specifying that: when there is no one upstairs and at least one person is downstairs then everyone is detected as being up and about, and therefore the automation can be re-enabled.
But if the presence sensor fails to detect me because I’m still sleeping soundly after my wife gets up and goes downstairs, that eventually will turn off the night mode, re-enabling the presence automation. The next time I turn over in bed, the full light comes on and it wakes me up.
So for now I have disabled this aspect of the automation and just rely on a manual override on a dashboard if that’s what I want to do or just wait until 8:00.
I hope the description of my logic is clear. Maybe I’m just trying to be too ambitious but it seemed a neat idea at the time.
Let’s say you have an FP2 with two zones: “Bed” and “Outside” (the area around the bed). Plus maybe a door sensor (like a P100) on the bedroom door that you and your wife open and close. Then you set up an automation with these conditions:
If the sensor loses track of you in bed and you aren’t detected in the “Outside” zone, nothing happens. However, if it detects you again when you get up and registers you as being away from the bed, and then spots you in the “Outside” zone and you open the bedroom door, that will trigger the scene. The only catch is that if the sensor already fails to detect both you and your wife as present to begin with, the automation might trigger too early or not at all. But at the very least, it should limit any potential error to the set 5 minutes.
You could obviously do the same thing with an FP300 pointing at the bed and a P2 or P1 motion sensor placed under the bed to catch your feet. Or just the FP300 and the door contact, etc. But you get the idea, right?
Alternatively, you could just skip the in-bed occupancy detection entirely and simply set up two automations with these triggers:
Presence is detected in zone “Outside” and within 5 minutes Bedroom Door “is open” → this then enables the second automation with the exact same triggers, which fires the scene and disables itself again.
This way, you’re indirectly counting how many people have actually gotten out of bed.
One more thing: If you use Apple Home and have an iPhone, you can also trigger scenes with your alarm clock
That wouldn’t be a bad idea seeing that one has zone detection and the other doesn’t….if we’re honest,I only chose the fp300 because it was wireless.I CANT STAND HANGING WIRES!!! Lmao
Hi, I would try to pair the FP300 with the P1 motion sensor. I would place the P1 under the bed so that it would react to the legs being lowered from the bed. The combination of the P1 motion and the presence of the FP300 could be a trigger to start the automation. These are my superficial thoughts. You don’t like wires, just like me
I am using fp2 in such a way that the bed is a zone (2x2.2m). It detects one or two persons in bed. It us positioned right above my bed on the wall… not sure if it suits your exact purpose…
I suggest putting a P1 under the bed with the control zone I drew in red. You lower your legs and the system sees that someone is “getting out of bed”.
Lots of interesting ideas here. My wife went mad at the suggestion of trailing wires, so an FP2 above is probably a non-starter. And there is so much stuff stored under the bed that the motion detector there would be difficult.
For now, while I work on other fine-tuning, I have reverted to a manual switch on a dashboard on my phone. This is a topic I will re-visit - perhaps when the FP-400 starts getting reviews.
If that’s an option—you did mention a staircase that you both use—maybe you could install two motion detectors there to detect whether someone is going up or down.
Then you could set up an automation like this:
Automation 1 IF: The sensor at the top detects motion and the sensor at the bottom detects motion within 1 minute = someone is going down the stairs THEN: Activate Automation 2
Automation 2 IF: The sensor at the top detects motion and, within 1 minute, the sensor at the bottom detects motion = someone is going down the stairs THEN: Turn on the automatic light + deactivate Automation 2
Automation 3 IF: The lower sensor detects motion and, within 1 minute, the upper sensor detects motion = someone is walking up the stairs THEN: Deactivate Automation 2
This means that the automatic light is activated only after two people have gone downstairs. And if the first person goes back upstairs, the system prevents the automatic light from being activated again if that same person goes back downstairs.
Thanks again all for the suggestions. I will be trying some of these and I will certainly see if I can try a lower sensor as well.
One issue is that I want it to be bullet proof for when we have visitors. I could just turn off the presence lighting automation altogether when we have visitors, as every lighting automation is accompanied by physical switches which act as overrides. But the whole idea is that automation should work for any visitors as well when they are in a guest bedroom. I suspect that they would have the same presence detection issues when lying still in bed. And it’s far more important not to disturb them by the early light coming on than it is for disturbing myself.
But I’ll get there in the end. Meanwhile I’m sticking with my manual toggle.
Not direct experience (mine’s mudroom presence, active movement, not someone lying still), but FP300’s mmWave likely reads breathing-level stillness as “no occupancy” past a certain threshold, that 45-50 minute gap tracks with what you’d expect once micro-movement drops too low. The 45-degree steep angle might not help either; a shallower mount could pick up breathing motion better than straight down.
Before spending on an FP2, I’d fix the automation side first: add a grace period so “no occupancy” needs to hold for 90+ minutes before daytime mode triggers, and gate it by time of day so a 3am gap never flips it regardless. Cheap fix, unknown-outcome hardware swap.
Don’t own an FP2 so I can’t confirm it’s actually better here. Has anyone run one through a full night and compared the gap length to what Brian’s seeing, or is it the same threshold problem with better marketing?
