I picked up some Aqara motion sensors without even looking out here on Hubitat. I have been trying to get them to behave but they won't stay connected. I've tried all sorts of drivers and none work well. However, that isn't my main concern right now. Is there a chance that having these on my Zigbee mesh would mess up other Zigbee devices? The motion sensor is the lumi.sensor_motion.aq2 model (RTCGQ11LM). I tried a couple of them but neither of them stayed connected more than a couple of hours.
The reason I ask is that I have a Zigbee valve that has been working great for months and this morning it opened and did not close as it was supposed to. When I noticed, I detached the valve and brought it in to mess with and it would not respond to Hubitat open and close commands at all. I took the batteries out, checked them, they are fine. I put them back in and the valve responds again. I am really trying to grasp what happened and the only new thing is the motion sensors yesterday...
There are a bunch of threads about Aqara on here. They are not fully zigbee compliant and can drop off and cause other zigbee repeating devices to drop as well. Your mileage will vary depending on what other devices you have on your system. It has nothing to do with the driver - it is at the zigbee protocol level.
I moved all my Aqara devices to a separate hub on a separate zigbee channel with only tradfri repeaters and they stay connected.
Yeah, I read many posts but none that really spoke of messing with other devices. I gave the Markus driver a swing again and the motion sensor has stayed connected so far. After digging around more, I'm not convinced that was what happened and think it was a coincidence since that was the only other Zigbe device to fall off and stop responding (the valve) out of 50 or more. Plus, the motion sensor had fallen off 6 hours prior.
I thought about doing the IKEA plugs, even read up on home assistant for the sensors but thought if I did that then I should just build out hom assistant completely, which is what I am leaning toward I think.
So, I get they aren't "zigbee compliant", but what I don't get is why they seem to work with any other zigbee hub, just not Hubitat? I have seen people say they work great on ST and HA...
They don't work great with any zigbee hub, outside of Xiaomi's Aqara and Mijia offerings, unless very specific precautions are taken.
I have a very large Aqara setup on zigbee2mqtt that I use via Home Assistant. I am very particular about the routers/repeaters I have on this network - having vetted every single one of them to support Mijia/Aqara devices. In addition, I have a repeater/end-device ratio of approximately 1:4 (so there's a high density of repeaters).
The Aqara/Mijia devices are not fully Zigbee compliant. If you search other Aqara threads, you'll see the key to making these stay connected is having SPECIFIC Zigbee repeaters on your network that are known to work to work with these devices.
The Ikea outlets are one such repeater, and at $13 are pretty inexpensive. I have 4 on my mesh just to make my Aqara devices (a whole bunch of light sensors plus some other things) stay connected.
(I got the light sensors for under $10 each, so they were really really cheap. Had I not wanted those, I would have avoided the Aqara devices)
Gotcha. That is definitely what I misunderstood. From all the posts of things to do to get them to work I was under the impression that they were strong alternatives. Probably best to just eat the loss and move on from the motion sensors, I guess. I have a couple of Sonoff that work okay, multiple Tuya, but threw most away and only left that work sort of okay. Maybe I will try Hue next.
IMHO this is the solution for nearly all Zigbee problems (even apart from Aqara).
I've installed a Tradfri repeater in every room - and since than no more outtakes.
Oddly enough, I was just reading the "approved" list and I have many (Sinope zigbee thermostats in every room, iharyadi environment sensors in a few rooms) so I do have things that "should" work well for them but I also have many of the Iris zwave/zigbee plugs as well so maybe the sensors are connecting to them rather than the other devices. Odd since the closest repeater to their location would be a Sinope zigbee thermostat but across the room is an Iris plug...
Stranger still, I had one sitting right next to one of the environment sensors the first night because it is next to where I sit/relax and I was fiddling with it and it still fell off...
You can also read this : Aqara P1 motion sensor - #80 by kkossev about how the Aqara motion sensors (the old versions, not the new ZIgbee 3.0 Aqara devices!) stick to the repeater that thay have chosen once during the pairing.
That is very good information! The first night of messing with them I took the advice of pairing close to the HE and they fell off quickly, a couple hours. Last night, I paired them close to the environment sensor and they are still connected today.
I ended up giving up on these things. I moved them to where I wanted them, moved the environment sensors so they were the closest device to them (in fact, the only devices in the same room were the environment sensor and Sinope zigbee thermostat, both are "supported" for the motion sensor) and paired them up but would still only stay connected for an hour or so. I decided I didn't want to risk home security to devices so flakey. Thankfully, I only paid $36 for 4 of them so it wasn't a huge investment. I ordered more Sonoff motion sensors since I wrote a driver for them that has been rock solid for months and will use those instead. Thought about setting up HA since I have a spare RPi4 laying around here but not sure I will bother given the feedback that they don't work "great" with any setup.
I had to get rid of my zigbee bulbs that contained a repeater to get my motion sensors stable. Lots of discussions about zigbee bulbs NOT properly working outside of bulb commands.
All my Zigbee bulbs are on a separate network controlled by Philips Hue hub, using the CoCoHue community integration app. This setup works rock solid with Aqara battery-powered sensors.
