I'm wondering if anyone here might be able to help me find a device. Currently I use my Tempest weather station as a Lux Sensor, and it works great. The downside is that it requires internet to communicate with the Hubitat. So if the internet goes out, a bunch of my automations will fall apart
I'm looking for a powered Lux sensor, thats either WiFi or Z-Wave. I want to permanently mount this on the side of my house and never touch it, so no battery! It doesn't NEED to work with Hubitat so long it works with HomeBridge/Homekit. So if its WiFi only, that would work too
I bought a HomeSeer HS-FLS100 and thought all my problems would be solved. It is hardwired, and provides a Lux reading. But when I installed it today, it makes this horrible high pitch sound. Perhaps its just defective, but I'm looking to find a different device if its not. Even though its outside, its so high pitch I can hear it from where I grill, and I don't want to deal with that.
I have this one and it always worked well. I know it works with HE but I never even migrated it because I use aeotec trisensors to average out the LUX on both sides of the house.
I know it's hard to validate if the battery will truly last 10 years but they are very confident in their claim and I haven't seen evidence to indicate otherwise. It was a good temp/lux sensor when I was on ST, it just became redundant when I replaced my other outdoor sensors.
I am in the same boat with using the Lux sensor for brining on background lights when it get's dark during a storm or to determine dark vs. light vs. where lighting is needed. It's the only automation I have that needs cloud and would fail if the internet went down.
I have just got done installing WeeWx to capture the UDP packets from the Tempest and I would say with a MQTT option I think I can pump the lux into the Hubitat but I just havn't had time to investigate. I know it's not a single box solution but I have a Raspberry Pi doing lightweight things like DNS and other services so adding the WeeWx was easy it was the configuration for me that was a bit harder due to my IoT VLANS.
Throwing another idea out there. Is there a device that can sense 120v and then report based on if its on or off? I could buy a dumb Photoelectric sensor, mount it where I want and then have something detect if its on or off?
as @rlithgow1 says above. I read that the Fibaro motion sensors will work like this - by simply connecting 5V DC in place of the CR123 battery. I intend to do that with a spare I have, as I want to use one internally pointing out of a window for some of my lighting rules. I have some switch off at sunrise but depending on weather, it's often still dark enough for the lights even when I've added an offset.
I am using the lux sensor in my weather station for my scene automations but that is probably overkill for what you are looking for:
One thing I forgot to add is I am using WeeWx for the data feed that takes the UDP broadcast data and converts it to MQTT. I have a few lines of code in the hubitat that looks for the data from the MQTT topic and then I can decode the lux level. Very geeky but everything is local. There is a lot of things that can go wrong but since putting WeeWx up during the Christmast holiday it's been running solid. I am still working on the MQTT under the hubitat since I don't have any retries or error handling.
Tempest --> Wifi Reciever --> UDP --> Raspberry PI with WeeWx --> MQTT --> Hubitat with MQTT subscriber --> custom device with Lux attribute
Well then he should do his integration differently.
The lux value on the weather flow weather station (v1 or tempest) is available locally with no internet connection. See some of the other comments above.
You can do it with weewx, you can do it with node-red, you can do it with a small JavaScript, etc.
As the hubitat hub cannot listen to unsolicited traffic on a UDP port, you cannot do it with hubitat alone though. Unfortunate, but true.
Thanks @JasonJoel you inspired me to add some error handling to my MQTT code and also tweak the if conditions to make sure I only process the right observations records on the MQTT Topic. I was up until 2 am doing this and I still can't sleep. Once I am in the the zone it's hard to turn off. I will post my code to the community when ready, it's not a universal driver but a good framework for integration.
