My house has some old Bell installed motion sensors. I am no longer subscribing to Bell home security, and hence the motion sensors are just stuck in various parts of the house not being used. The Bell sensors are nicely installed in wall corners, which means that they can serve as corner wedges for my sonoff sensors
is there any issue(such as interference etc.) if I stick my motion sensor on top of another motion sensor? One thing I have already noticed is that my sensor seems to be dropping off the mesh, which I am not sure if it is because of battery or due to the current location.
Having one sensor over the other shouldn’t be a problem. You might want to remove the battery on the old Bell ones.
They might be dropping off the mesh because the Zigbee signal is not strong enough? I have a few of those Sonoff sensors and they are pretty stable. I do however have a very strong mesh - lots of repeaters!
I do have an ikea USB repeater right under that motion sensor...and this repeater is not far away from the main hub...so hopefully range/mesh should not be an issue.
Here is what the log shows for my repeater placed right under that motion sensor:
[ikea usb outlet, A948], LQI:254, age:3, inCost:1, outCost:1
Agreed - range should be okay. (Though I have not spent time learning to distinguish a good LQI value from a bad one - someone else will need to chime in on that…)
What driver are you using? I have had good luck with the stock motion (no temp) driver.
I'd be tempted to gut the case of the old one and insert the new one if you could make it look nice. Would get rid of anything that might interfere radio-wise.
Aside: this is another case of where it would be really nice if there was some built in real time tool to help analyze device placement, even as simple as a bar graph indicating signal quality.... and going further, a real time display of what path the device is taking back to the hub.
That repeater looks fine. When the sensor activates, what figures show up in Zigbee logging on the Zigbee details page? If it's using that repeater as a last hop, it will show the same LQI as anything being repeated by the Ikea outlet (including the logging for the outlet itself).
I would recommend you try the stock driver: Zigbee Motion (No Temp)
It is the one I have been using successfully for a while now. It does’t have presence however, but it does report occasionally so an app like the Device Watchdog could report on its presence.
I second this recommendation. I use stock drivers whenever possible.
While experiences differ, my experience from more than a year ago is that a large number of zigbee devices using drivers that sent pings for presence made my zigbee mesh unstable. So I quit using them.
