SHELLY Goodies to Write About on my Birthday

I’ve just started a write-up on the Sonoff Window/Door sensors (WIFI and RF) and what should arrive? The Shelly Door/Window2 sensor. This is no ordinary AliExpress job RF, it’s a MONSTER for starters. The sensor arrived with no batteries – that was a worry but luckly Amazon had some in stock – the sheer cost of the batteries alone comes to more than the price of a cheap RF door sensor – so I’m expecting a LOT.

If you’ve seen the Sonoff writeup you’ll know I was mystified by the batteries on their RF sensor – not your average AAA battery. Well, this Shelly blows all that out of the water – not only are the door sensor and magnet larger than normal but the required batteries (which just arrived today) are HUGE. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a CR123A and the Shelly sensor takes TWO of them.

And after all of that (each battery is half the length of my thumb) I plugged in the two batteries, closed up the back and lo – a flashing red light – which stopped flashing and went dead after maybe a minute while I was being distracted by my phone telling me the front door back in the UK is opening (cleaning crew). See I don’t just write about these gadgets, I use them. Anyway, to the point….

What next? Well, this is no ordinary door sensor – it has a LUX sensor built in as well and works on WiFi. At this point I took the easy option, opened up my phone then opened the SHELLY APP (this isn’t going to be one of those CLOUD stories as I know Shelly stuff can manage local WiFi access) – let’s get on with it..

Looking at the APP over on the left, you may well ask why everything is offline.

My Shelly Plus PM and Shelly Plus 1PM (on the left) are sitting on my desk and the ShellyEM (one device, two blocks as it has 2 power monitoring inputs) is running back in the UK but I don’t have my VPN on right now and I chose not to hook it into the cloud.

So, let’s get right to the new door sensor sitting in front of me. I’ve not a clue what to do next so you’re learning with me.

In the Shelly APP – menu – top right 3 BARS I’m going to ADD DEVICE. Shelly has asked if it can check my networks, I’ve ticked my nearest access point and entered the password. It’s now looking for devices. No? I didn’t think so – I guess I’ll have to stick a pin into the hope in the sensor so it goes into setup mode.

Erm, no. Instructions say open the back and press the button. What button? I could not see one so I just took one of the batteries out for a tick and that started setup mode. A device appeared and I agreed to add it to my network. Do I want to connect? Yes. Successfully added. End of story.

Add discovered parts to my office? Yes. ID076033 could not connect. Still could not connect on second attempt. Ooh, dear – and the end part of its local IP address is missing on the right – see photo left.

So the APP knows all about this device but won’t let it connect. Minutes later I saw the APP trying to connect Shelly Door 2.

I took out the battery to ensure there was no button I was missing – put the battery back in and closed the back. Immediately the APP asked me to give the device a name. I did that and an announcement said the APP was connecting to the cloud.

And now… WELL, this is novel – TWILIGHT, 100(% battery), 23.5c temperature) and CLOSED (the magnet is right up to the sensor). I’ve done nothing to get this far. I guess the next step is to separate the sensor and magnet.

YUP – it works! So yes, this is big and more expensive than your average cheap door sensor but CLEARLY it’s not just your average door sensor. OOH did I just see an UPDATE offer? Yes I do.

You HAVE to have one of these just to play with. It’s FUN. OH, and according to the APP, the device is updating – and the red light on the device is flashing. As I was doing this – the light sensor went to dark simply as I put my hand over the device.

A couple of minutes later, the light on the device went off – but the APP continued to say the device was updating so I left them to fight it out.

I seem to recall the APP not quite keeping up the last time I introduced Shelly devices, so I’m not worried yet. More to report soon and I have other Shelly devices to look at – Shelly button (not the button I chatted about last time but a neat case to fit over various Shelly devices), Shelly H&T (which looks like a tiny fire alarm but is actually a temperature and humidity sensor) – and Shelly Plus 2PM which has a pair of 10A contacts and power monitoring.

And again I’ll report my setup queries with the APP back to Allterco.

For now, a quick reboot of the phone, all is well, the firmware is updated, time to have a play with my monster Shelly Door/Window2.

I note once again, Shelly recommend a fixed IP and as I’ve come to realise recently the easiest way to do this is to set a mac/ip pairing in the router – if that’s not possible the fixed address can be set in the Shelly device itself in the settings.

Because this Shelly Door/Window2 device is currently (default) hooked to the cloud, it is storing min and max temperature.

I tend eventually to remove devices from the cloud and instead use locally via MQTT, storing history on my MQTT broker locally but that’s down to personal choice. For anyone looking in who’s not already familiar with MQTT, Node-Red and Grafana, these are all free software tools running on, for example a Raspberry Pi. MQTT which Shelly supports, lets you grab readings, which can then be processed by Node-Red and passed to Grafana for graphing – but that’s just what I do, there are many alternative ways of doing things.

All part of the fun.