Another new Shelly product – this time a small, USB-powered presence detector from Shelly in Bulgaria. Rather than dive into the Shelly app I went straight for Zigbee use and added the device to my Zigbee2MQTT setup under Home Assistant.
At first, Zigbee2MQTT accepted the device but said it was unsupported but within a minute it came back with the status presence true or false.
I went into the deep end and opened up Home Assistant to notice that Shelly Presence Gen4 was available and to see what entities were available for use. Up to now I can only see one unique entity, that’s presence true or false, there appear to be several identical entries.
No doubt that will change maybe as Home Assistant gets used to it or maybe this was an automatically generated setup and perhaps this needs further work to go into Home Assistant properly.
For example my Apollo sensors show dozens of different things you can look at. This just shows presence or absence.
I would have thought there would be movement, etc, and possibly movement number one, two, three, four for different people in the room but no, I just see the one for now; but it works.
After setting up Shelly presence in Zigbee – adding it to the Shelly app (just for the sake of it) was the easiest install I’ve ever done – I simply hit + in the app and the app asked me if I wanted to attach it to my normal access point – didn’t even ask for the password for that. It then asked me which picture I wanted to use and where the location would be (i.e. my office) and that was it. It was installed within seconds. I noted Shelly Presence Gen4, twilight one zone and no objects so clearly this is a multi-zone sensor. Just not fully integrated into Zigbee yet.
Hah, this is the stuff I’ve only seen in Home Assistant integrations up to now, fully built into the Shelly app. I love it. More when I get some people in here to see how it handles multiple occupants. Better yet, fake my WiFi SSID on the phone and take it to the pub with a USB power bank. That’d be fun… my office is a tad small for this.. After this image which shows illuminance as TWILIGHT, I turned on a brighter bulb in my office and almost immediately that display showed BRIGHT.
I’m a little concerned that at this point I went back to Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT and Presence shoed as NULL even though the sensor was clearly showing me (or a generic person, rather) present in the room in the Shelly app. (Zigbee) and in the second instance (APP) “unknown” – see image below. I’ve asked Shelly for clarification.
Ok some progress – but not a lot. In the native app mode (WiFi), the device appears magically in the Shelly integration in Home Assistant.
At first sight – marvellous if a bit sparse, but on test… that Room detected objects says “1 objects” above” and the room occupancy says “Detected” above.. bearing in mind I’m half a metre away from the unit on my desk, if I stop moving.. room occupancy quickly changes to “clear” and Room detected objects to “0 objects”. Bearing in mind this is a “presence sensor” and not a “movement sensor” that is definitely not right.