Aqara FP1E Presence Sensor

[kkossev]

Hi @vsman ,

I will try to answer as detailed as I can, so I will be quoting your questions.

@vmsman

Ok, so I did originally reference the link you provided. In that link it suggests the HPM install. Per your advice, I uninstalled the HPM driver and manually installed the other in the link

Uninstalling the same driver to install it from HPM works, but you can achieve the same result using HPM 'Match Up' function.

Note, that there are two similarly named drivers in HPM - Jonathans 'Aqara Human Presence Sensor FP1'`and mine 'Aqara P1 Motion Sensor'. The screenshot in your first post shows Jonathan's driver, which is for Aqara FP1 and will not work with Aqara FP1E.

@vmsman

"What does it mean to pair the device at least twice?"

I will try to rephrase @marktheknife explanation :

Pair the device, then pair it again without removing it from the hub. The hub will recognize it and initialize it correctly on the second attempt.

I have edited the pairing hint in the Preferences section a bit :

If you can suggest better wording, please help - English is not my primary language.

@vmsman

When I un-pair and pair the device again isn't that like starting over? Why would that make a difference?

It makes a difference, but I am not sure why this is needed with HE hubs. When writing the old FP1 driver before one year, I was able to make it pair easy and correctly to SmartThings V2 hub, to Home Assistant Z2M, but not to Hubitat hubs. There is something in the HE pairing procedure that Aqara doesn't like... So I had to implement heavy workarounds in the initial pairing exchange of Zigbee messages (mimicking the Aqara hub responses / pretending to be an Aqara hub....) - no other platforms need this.

Anyway, for a successful initialization, two consecutive pairing attempts without deleting/removing the device in between are needed.

@vmsman

In using the manually installed driver, the device now looks like below. The health is still "unknown"

When pairing for a second or third time (very close to the hub!), observe the live logs, If there are just a few lines of debug logs, you must try pairing once again. An indication of a successful initialization is the number of the received Zigbee messages - this is the 'rxCounter' state variable :

@vmsman

and I see no "zone" setting which is the point of this device

Aqara FP1E does not have zone settings!
The old FP1 has zones, although I never made them work successfully enough, even with Jonathans driver.

@vmsman

At first glance this appears to be just like a standard PIR motion detector except that those seem to work better

Every device marketed as a 'presence sensor' is actually a very sensitive motion sensor, but the motion detection principle is different. Sensors based on sophisticated analysis of the reflected mmWaves can detect micro-motions, such as the movement of a human chest while breathing.

@vmsman

In reading everything on the web, I see no one that has one of these apparently working except through Aqara's proprietary hub and app. Looks like the majority of those who have had success end up using it in the Amazon eco-system.

This is a very new device by Aqara, the folks from Z2M, ZHA, Deconz are still working on it!

@vmsman

Maybe I should send this back and get one of the FP1 devices instead?

I would suggest to get a cheap Aqara E1 Matter Bridge hub instead - it pairs instantly, and will benefit from the 'Enhanced Precision with AI', whatever this means..

Connecting the Aqara FP1E via the custom Matter Bridge package works just fine :

[RELEASE] Matter Advanced Bridge (limited device support)

The new Aqara FP1E was discovered and works without any problems via Aqara M3 hub! [image]

Aqara FP1E has the same difficult Zigbee direct pairing procedure as the Aqara P1 and Aqara FP1 sensors.