Taking pledges and looking for someone willing to get Wireless Sensor Tags working on Hubitat

$100 pledged so far (includes facebook post) ## I would really like to retire my ST hub and the last part is to get my Wireless Sensor Tags going on HE. This post is 2 fold, 1) please make a post with the amount you are willing to pay if someone can deliver Support for Wireless Sensor Tags on HE with out any other hubs as work around. 2) find someone who is willing to make this happen and take our money :slight_smile: Please message me if there is any questions.

FB post is here: Hubitat Users Group Public Group | Facebook

Wireless Tags home page: Monitor and Find Everything from the Internet - Wireless Sensor Tags

ST app github: smartthings/WirelessTags at master · st-swanny/smartthings · GitHub

ST Integration
forum: Wireless Sensor Tags Integration - Community Created Device Types - SmartThings Community

actually having one of these in my wifes business fridge would be a great idea to catch any temperature issues. Has anyone used these that they actually do what they say they do ?

*reading their reviews, their app and customer service seem to be pretty bad.

1 Like

I waited for years for this. I finally gave up and got:

  • IKEA 303.561.69 Trådfri Wireless Control Outlet (3 for the house)
  • Xiaomi Aqara Smart Temperature Humidity Sensor Zigbee (3 so far)

I tired the Xiaomi before but they kept dropping off. Once I got the IKEA Outlets, they have been rock solid! They calibrated pretty nicely. I keep them within .5F of my thermostat. It took a lot of research and trial by error (I have 5 ZooZ 4-in-1 that I need to unload), but I finally got the tags replaced. No more cloud and no more delay from the Tags -> SmartThings -> HE. That 3-4 minutes we starting to drive me crazy.

I really dug the Tags. They were pretty accurate and needed no care and feeding. I don't think they are really geared towards a cloudless solution.

2 Likes

Looks like they have an API to their cloud server.

http://wirelesstag.net/apidoc.html

Have you tried porting the ST integration to Hubitat?

I'm not on Facebook, but this seems like a disorganized way to do this. Why not get a quote from a developer that seems capable (preferably someone who's written HE drivers before), and then start a GoFundMe or something instead?

The way it's going now, your bounty is just going to keep building and building until someone picks it up. Plus, a pledge means nothing on a facebook post. How many of those people are actually going to pay up? You're gonna have one angry developer if he was expecting a certain amount of moola and he only gets part of it.

Write up a solid list of requirements and specs that detail the desired outcome, have a few developers give you an LOE and quote, pick one, and start the Gofundme.

1 Like

The one thing your solution doesn't have is the range or signal strength. I have one in my deep freezer and one on a shed way out in my back yard. Zigbee doesn't have the ability there.

I have never done a go fund me but I heard they take a chunk of the money raised, not to mention I have no idea where to go to find a developer for hire. You are correct on the cash though this is on the honor system and not everyone will be honorable. I will look into go fund me, if you know of a way to find a developer to get a quote.

There has been a couple of attempts by people here in the community but no one has ever been successful, that has shared anyway. I think the hang up had something to do with authentication. I am not a programmer though so take that with a grain of salt.

The first way I'd go about finding a developer for this would be here, on this forum. Find out who is interested in doing HE dev work for hire. Put together requirements/specs/milestones, send it to them all, and find out who is willing to try and what their price would be. Research their prior dev work for HE, and pick the person who is best suited for this. Come up with a timeline, and release the Gofundme funds upon successful delivery of a driver/app that meets all of the requirements.

Failing finding someone here, there are plenty of contracting sites that have programmers (wework, whatever rentacoder.com is called now, fieldnation, etc). The only problem there is that there's an additional level of vetting that you need to do, and they also need access to the hardware which they probably do not currently have. Also, if you're hiring someone offshore, I've found that it requires a lot more specifics in what you're looking for, as well as a lot more oversight.

The Tags have limited range too. While you can select between 5 different bands (narrow - wide), the farther away you are the more energy it takes to transmit and thus the faster the battery wears down. This is pretty important as they don't have an ability to use extenders.

In my particular case, I used a Trådfri to extend the Zigbee range. And, along that topic, I also have another HE hub in my back yard connected to a wireless extender. It's sole purpose is to control some back yard and flood lights which are out of the Z-Wave range.

1 Like

I think @homeauto2112 has it right. Just get a second HE (take advantage of the July 4th sale) and then use HubConnect to seamlessly use devices across both HEs in your automations.

The Xiaomi sensors are cheap - I bought temperature/humidity/pressure sensors for $9 apiece. And a new hub is $80 during the current sale. So that gives you 2 sensors and one hub for the $100 pledged so far.

1 Like

After seeing this thread, I looked at those sensor tags, and they are expensive for what they are. I thought maybe they could be used similar to Tile to crowdsource the finding/tracking of lost or stolen devices, but no. These things don't seem very compelling for the price. Most are not even weatherproof, so they sell a tiny ziplock bag for them if you put them outside.

It seems like the Xiaomi/Aqara sensors are a much much cheaper option, they are smaller, and they are already supported. Aliexpress has most of these sensors for around $8-10 each, and they've been arriving here at my house within a week of ordering.

Is local control required? You can just route all
Of the data they IFTTT to HE, lots of ppl do this with non supported devices but there is a 2-3sec lag involved and internet connection is required. Could be a temp solution until you find a HE developer.

At this point it sounds like this was a dumb idea, I will just wait for someone to eventually do this or for something else to work. Spending $100 my self for new sensors and a hub is not possible at this point. Still not sure why I would need a second hub though. I can't put it in my back yard. Anyway thanks for the ideas.

I'm not sure about the new hub either. I just pointed it out as WirelessTags can't use multiple extenders where HE could for extending Zigbee.

The Trådfri are only $29 and the Temp sensors are $16. You could probably find them for less elsewhere. That gives you one extender and 4 sensors for $100. Not a bad investment.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NYYG8SG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Don't buy them on Amazon. Ikea sells the plugs for $9.99, and the repeater only unit for $12.99. They are both repeaters, but the $12.99 dedicated repeater apparently has more range.

1 Like

Or use Upwork

I don’t think your request is “dumb” at all. Unfortunately, not all technologies are adaptable OR have value to the masses. While I understand your need to not invest in other currently supported technologies to replace what you have you may want to bite the bullet and determine if the technology you HAVE invested in has a shelf life. If there isn’t much development on ST, Hass.IO or OpenHab then just “maybe” you want to take advantage of eBay and sell while you can get top dollar.

Just a suggestion. Everyone here wants to help you solve your problem...but we only have ideas using technologies that are supported and known to work. I bet what you are doing someone else has done with supported sensors.

4 Likes

It's not a dumb idea at all. Wireless Tags are integrated with other systems and very popular.

The issue/problem with doing it here with Hubitat is interest. Sure you put out a bounty for it... now if a developer even wanted to take on this they would have to purchase wireless tags themselves to learn/understand and develop against to provide a quality integration. That's $100 investment right there... so now there's no profit at all but there's a lot of developer time spent which is A LOT more than $100. This doesn't even take into account maintenance and bug fixes and that's a lot more time than initial development usually. Then there's recurring revenue...there is none. Once the code is released it's "free" and can be used, taken, stolen by anyone.

It's a catch 22... there's absolutely NO incentive for 3rd parties to develop on this platform. Without incentive the only development comes from within the community of which they will develop apps/drivers for things that are of personal interest to them. They may release the app but don't count on it always and don't count on support either.

Having a market place has been discussed a few times and as of yet gone no where.

4 Likes

I happened to have bought one of these wireless tags awhile ago and recently interested to put it in use.

Done some porting/coding of drivers so I'll give this porting a try and see however maybe slightly slow (too many projects I threw on myself and lost a lot of hair already).