Have you looked into creating a smarthome compatible occupancy sensor? This feels like a pretty large hole in the market currently. There are plenty of these sensors that are not z-wave/zigbee enabled, but I haven’t found a single one for smarthome use. I’m thinking the standard motion detector, but with microwave or ultrasonic blended in to help detect people who are fairly stationary.
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I would love something like this. Bonus points if it could be combined with a light switch/dimmer similar to Lutron switches.
I like this idea! Especially if Inovelli could maintain the look and feel of their existing switch lineup. I have a few of the older style motion sensor switches. They don’t work that well and they look out of place.
Problem here is multiple tech sensors use a lot of power, so in the alarm world they are generally hardwired.
We’ve gotten really good at making low energy PIR sensors, so a Z-Wave multisensor can pack a PIR, temp, humidity, lux, etc into a single pack and have it run for months off a battery. But those are all passive sensors- the sensor just samples what’s hitting the sensor unit and decides based on that whether there’s motion.
Ultrasonic, radar, microwave, etc are all active sensors where the sensor device emits a signal of some kind and looks at what bounces back to decide if there’s motion or occupancy. Thus in the alarm world these units would generally get power from the alarm panel (at least I’m not aware of any battery operated multi tech sensors).
For Z-Wave- there is a GE Z-Wave motion sensor dimmer combo (single gang style), but it’s just more PIR motion. A good multi sensor needs some space for the actual sensor units / antennas, probably more than you can cram into a single gang switch (especially if you also want it to be a switch).
Just wanted to add my support for this. I have a half dozen non-smart Lutron motion sensor dimmers that actually work very well where they are being used so I haven’t smartified them yet. (Also I paid a pretty penny for them!). But I would upgrade to Inovelli ones in a heartbeat to match my red-series dimmers. Especially if it reported motion events and light levels to z-wave. This would be very useful for presence detection and alarm system in my Home Assistant setup. Big bonus points if you could squeeze a little temperature sensor in there too!
In a nutshell I’d like you to squeeze a 4in1 sensor, a dimmer and z-wave module into a single gang decora switch that matches the red series dimmers. Easy peasy right? Seriously though, I’d take a half dozen and probably even more of these if they were available today.