One of my many projects has been completed. I wanted something to tell me when the mailman opened the mailbox. It is a metal mailbox in a brick ‘tower’. The metal mailbox acts as a shield, and everything I tried couldn’t escape the metal box, so my only option was something with an external antenna. The Ring mailbox sensor won’t work with HE. I put an IKEA RGBW Zigbee bulb in the post light that is about 20 feet from the mailbox, hoping it would act as a repeater. The Zigbee map showed the Tuya motion sensor was not connecting to the IKEA bulb, but rather something in the house. Then I added a Tuya USB Zigbee repeater plugged into an outlet in front of the house. Now the mailbox sensor communicated with the Tuya repeater. All this testing was done with the mailbox door open. With the door closed, communication was hit and miss. Then I had one of those epiphany things and drilled a hole in the back of the mailbox and into the brick so it is recessed.
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The rule :
The ‘alert beacon’ is a GU10 RGBW in an aluminum cylinder from AliExpress
