THIRDREALITY Zigbee Motion Sensor, Pet Friendly, Compatible with Home Assistant, SmartThings, Aeotec, Homey, Hubitat or Echo Devices with Built-in Zigbee Hub

GREAT NO-FRILLS SENSOR- 35 second recovery time!
UPDATED BELOWI picked this up for $15.99 and so far so good. The sensor is about as small as it could possibly be and still fit two AAA batteries inside. It paired right away via Zigbee with my Hubitat C-5 hub and no other configuration was required (but see the little quirk below in the update). It does not have a tamper sensor. The only data returned by the sensor are motion and battery level. The coverage area is nice and wide and I was pleased to discover that the motion sensing recovery time is only about 35 seconds. Why does this matter?I currently have six Bosch motion/temp sensors in various places and one of them is right outside my front door. I happened to get those on some sort of weird flash sale for $30 each where they were normally about $90. For $30 they are just fine, but they are large, take 4AA batteries, and most significantly have a MINIMUM three-minute recovery time in between motion sensing events.I use one of the Bosch sensors to alert me when one of my two dogs has returned from whatever adventures they were having outside. They tend to do their own thing and one of them almost always comes back before the other one. If they return more than three minutes apart then it’s not problem and I get two separate alerts for the two different dogs and can open the door twice. But if the second dog comes back during the three-minute window right after the first, the Bosch motion sensor won’t pick up the new motion alert and the second dog will be forced to wait outside with no recognition from his owner.No big deal right? He just has to wait another three minutes. Well, no. If you are within the three-minute recovery period and the sensor is tripped again, it starts a NEW three-minute recovery period. Assuming the dog doesn’t freeze to death and keeps moving at some point during that three-minute period, the sensor will just keep re-tripping and going into an endless loop of three-minute recovery periods until the dog finally freezes or dehydrates. Thus the dilemma.With the 35-second recovery period of this sensor, I have now reduced the potential mortality rate of my second dog to return home by a factor of five. Good progress.UPDATE: The first sensor continues to work great a month later. I bought two more via the two-pack deal. The first one paired up instantly with zero issues. The second one paired up fine but came up as (blank) for the device type (Hubitat C-5 hub) and very strangely showed “Signify NV” as the manufacturer instead of ThirdReality. I tried changing the device type manually to “Generic Zigbee motion sensor- no temp,” which is what the other two sensors automatically configured as. The sensor would show up as a device in my Hubitat device list but would not report any data. I removed it, did a factory reset, re-added, repeated, and still had the same problem. Posted a question here to see if there was a firmware update.Before I gave up, I tried one last thing that I had zero expectation of working. I removed the device again from Hubitat, held down the reset button and did a factory reset, and then took the batteries out. While holding down the reset button, I put the batteries back in and did one more reset. I have no idea why or how, but this somehow fixed the issue. The sensor paired up no problem with Hubitat, configured as “Generic Zigbee motion sensor- no temp” and properly showed “ThirdReality” as the manufacturer. From there on out the sensor worked just fine. I can’t explain it but if you have the same weird problem I did, try doing a couple factory resets and holding down the button while taking the batteries out and then putting them back in. LOL the mysteries of the universe.

After 48 hours in moderate temp garage. Frustrating garbage.
Complete garbage. Got 1 of 2 connected pretty quickly and everything was looking good. But after about 48 hours everything went south. One became unreachable. So I reconnected it but regardless both stopped working on my zigbee network. So hours and hours of trying to disconnect and reconnect I just gave up and will now buy another brand. Such promise but these are cheaply made and my guess is they couldn’t handle 50 degree F garage temps. So maybe this would work better inside a heated space. Just guessing as I could no longer handle the frustration.Update:I’m new at zigbee. I didn’t realize these motion sensors are end points and not repeaters. I spend another $100 on some 3 way switches and installed them in between my controller and the sensors. Now one is green and one yellow but everything is working well now and I’m happy. It’s important to realize these are not nearly as powerful as wifi. So you will need mains powered repeaters like switches in between. I’ve been feeling out big time and have now spent $250 just to get my garage lights to turn on and start on with motion. But it’s sort of a hobby now and I’ve found more cool use cases like using an outdoor motion sensor to use an outdoor camera to snap a picture of my driveway and front door and text it email it and send me a telegram. My wife can get it too but she doesn’t care about it as much as I do. I like to have evidence of my deliveries etc. I had to use grok extensively to figure out how to get it to work.So I’m a happy camper but you best be ready to make this a full time job for a week or two.I also now have a water sensor next to my water heater that will beep and text me an alert if it defects water. Super cool!

parfait avec zigbee2mqtt sous domoticz

Giving it 5 stars because it worked out of the box with the echo hub, no messing around. 1 to 2 second routine responses on movement.