Aqara Presence Sensor FP2, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi Required, mmWave Radar Wired Motion Sensor, Zone Positioning, Multi-Person & Fall Detection, Supports HomeKit, Alexa, Google Home and Home Assistant

I gave it a 1-star review in May 2024 due to how buggy and inaccurate it was but I gave it another shot almost a year later and the software has come a LONG way. With the current firmware it's one of the better presence sensors I've used.

I now own and use two different Presence Detectors. I bought the FP2 Detector because, unlike my first unit, it supports multiple detection zones. Being able to designate detection zones works much better for me. I am glad I made this purchase.The FP2 actually has three modes of operation – Fall Detection, Sleep Monitoring, and Zone Detection. I only use Zone Detection, and have set up 6 out of a maximum of 30 detection zones. The unit’s coverage area is divided into 320 checkerboard squares, and you can configure which of those squares compose each zone that you wish to create.My house has an open concept floor plan, and I have located my FP2 such that it can detect presence in my Kitchen, Dining Room, and Living Room. I have setup zones for controlling the ceiling lights in each of those these rooms, along with several individual lamps in various locations.The competitor’s Presence Detector I purchased earlier detected anything and everything within a 120° angle in front of it that was within a certain distance based on a ballpark sensitivity setting. It failed to detect some areas I wanted included, and detected other areas I didn’t wanted included. The FP2, with its zone detection, resolves that issue. For example, I have a small 2 square zone that encompasses our piano bench, which I use to turn ON the piano music light when and only when someone is sitting there.I noticed this product has some poor reviews. I suspect this is because some users had difficulty getting it setup and configured. I personally was a bit challenged getting mine setup and working, despite already having done lots of automations using dozens of smart devices. For this reason I have deducted one star. However, now that I am familiar with this unit and its capabilities, I would not hesitate to order another one – and I would not consider an alternate cheaper unit as I did for my first presence sensor.The instructions are sparse. I ended up setting it up three times before I got it working like I wanted. I discovered it helps to configure the Edge Zones along the perimeter of the detection area, as well as Entrance & Exit Areas to minimize unwanted detections. I also discovered it helps to be slightly generous on most Detection Zones because the exact location a person is in becomes less precise the further you are located from the sensor, or when a person is near a reflective surface such as a refrigerator.The Aqara App only controls Aqara devices. Thus, out of the box I couldn’t use it to perform any automation! Fortunately, it links to Alexa, and once I linked Aqara to Amazon’s Alexa, I could start controlling the lights and lamps in my house. The Aqara App claims to also link to Home Assistant, Google Home, and IFTTT. I don’t use IFTTT and was unable to get it to link to Home Assistant. For my more complex automations, I use Smartthings since Alexa routines are limited to a single Trigger. Thus, I ended up creating Virtual Switches in Smartthings and used Alexa to flip those switches based on Presence in each of the zones I created. Later, I got a Smartthings Hub which would recognize the FP2, which allowed me to use Smartthings without going through the overhead of Alexa. Smartthings and its ability to use virtual switches allowed me to create more complex routines, such as turning off the lamp between my recliner and couch when some leaves the couch zone and no one is in the recliner zone – but if someone is still using the recliner, only turn Off the far couch lamp (multiple ‘IF’ triggers required).The FP2 has a Luminance meter, but getting that to control whether automated lights are turned On or not when Presence is detected was a big challenge for me. The workaround I initially came up with was to create a dummy zone in Aqara and use Aqara automation to control Home & Away status in that zone based on the Lux level. I then used an Alexa routine that would flip a Smartthings virtual switch based on the Aqara ‘Simple Security System’ device value of Home or Away. Why that functionality couldn’t have been made much more straight forward is beyond me. However, after I got my Smartthings Hub to recognize the FP2, I was able to add conditional triggers in my Smartthings automations that were tied to luminance levels, making FP2 luminance levels easier to include in automations and also make Lux thresholds flexible.The bottom line is that the FP2 is a very capable device. But more capabilities equates to more complexity. Thus, don’t expect to have lots of automation configured and working an hour after unpacking the unit. And unless you have other Aqara devices or a hub that recognizes the FP2, don’t expect to perform to automations until you link it to another App such as Alexa. Note that once you link Aqara to Alexa, you can pretty much do any automation that you would normally do in Alexa. It’s only when your automations get too complex for Alexa that automation understandably becomes a bit more involved, and has to jump through hoops involving products/apps from multiple manufacturers.

Got this to use for presence detection in my bedroom. Unfortunately it has far too many problems to be useful.Minimal annoyance, this comes with a short USB cord but does not come with a power supply so you'll have to buy that separately. That's probably the nicest thing I can say about the product though.First, the setup is quite annoying as it requires an app with an account to set up the sensor, even if you only want to use it local with Homekit connectivity. There are also many confusing, contradictory, and vague labels and descriptions in the app that I'm guessing are related to badly translated words or unknown differences between parts of the world and no good descriptions such as which sensitivity is for what size room in quantifiable units. It is also very vague and confusing how you set up the detection zones/squares and then attempting to use the guided/automatic setup generates errors saying something can't overlap but doesn't really explain what is overlapping or wrong to guess how to fix it.Worth noting, Homekit integration (at least with Home Assistant) only shows a true/false indication of presence in a zone, not the count of how many people are in a zone like the Aqara app reports. So don't plan to use this to do something like tell if you have 1 vs multiple people in an area.Assuming you get it set up, it doesn't seem to work well. I tried having it in the middle of a wall as suggested, as well as in different corners of the room. All of these had massive mis-detections with numerous false-positive and false-negative results.I tried running the "AI learning" mode, however it didn't seem to help much. If I ran "learning" with my ceiling fan off, it would work decently until I turned the fan on or the blades were moved. If I ran "AI learning" with the ceiling fan on it would work slightly better on false-positives but frequently failed to detect people actually in the room.I'd also tried the "ignore pets" mode (which warns it will miss children) but it didn't actually seem to do anything for reducing false-positives from either of our dogs. Even more confusingly it seemed like it more-frequently would "lose track of" our bigger dog (around 50lb) and more frequently thought our smaller dog (around 40lb) was a person.The other very annoying thing I found was it seemed to have false-detection on stuff that can move around - for example the pillows on my bed being piled differently seemed to be detected as another person and/or it would get confused if I was laying on my side holding a pillow then got out of bed without putting the pillow back up at the headboard would think I was still in the bed after I left the room, or would think 2+ people were suddenly in the room. A similar thing happened when I did laundry and put the laundry bag on a chair until I got to folding the clothes it thought there was a person randomly in the chair. And again with a suitcase that I put down after a weekend trip when I didn't have time to unload and store it immediately.I also briefly tried this in our livingroom but it had many issues there too. It frequently "lost track of" where I was if I sat on the sofa behind a table in the middle of our room for a couple minutes but then getting up would think I was a 2nd person. Do that a couple times and it thinks there are 4 people sitting on the sofa when I'm the only one in the room and would not "clear" the ghost-people until I forced a re-learning or power-cycled the unit (and then that wouldn't fix the problem, just cleared it until I sat down again).It seems this product is aimed at only people who have a perfectly clean room with nothing in the middle and nothing that ever gets set down or moved, and does not have any ceiling fans. I guess maybe an office building or schoolroom might work acceptably but it sure is not suitable for a residence where you have personal belongings that can be picked up or set down on different furniture or might not put everything away instantly upon returning home. It also seems unsuitable if you have pets.I can't recommend this unit, especially given its quite expensive and requires constant power. I'm going to stick with inexpensive PIR sensors.

I bought this primarily for the sleep tracking, but I also had other plans for the motion detection automation. Here is what I was unaware of before purchasing. I did not even try the motion detection part since that was more of a secondary benefit for me.1. If you use it for sleep tracking, you can't also use it for motion detection at the same time. It is one or the other.2. The sleep monitoring is listed in the app as "Free trial". It doesn't say how long the trial is or what happens when the trial ends, but it implies that you might have to pay a subscription after a while or something.3. In order to use the sleep monitoring, you have to mount it in a specific location. It needs to be centered above your head on the wall. This makes sense to get the best results, but that meant I couldn't put it where I had originally planned.4. The results aren't very accurate for sleep monitoring. Each night it would say I was absent 8-9 times per night.I also saw something about needing a hub for automation, but I didn't look into that since I decided to return it. The product itself seemed like it was good quality and I've heard great things about the presence sensor and the app was nice, but the above mentioned limitations on the sleep tracking were deal breakers for me.