I just received my unit today and installed it promptly. Things seemed to work (somewhat), but I’m having issues where the switch will often turn off while I’m sitting at my desk.
To give a bit more context; when I sit next to the switch it seems to relatively reliably detect presence. When i sit at my desk (facing away from the switch) at roughly 16’ away diagonally, it seems to be hit or miss. If I move enough; it seems to detect my motion, but if I stop moving sufficiently to read the screen for example, it will always turn off the lights after some time. Turning my chair around to stare at the switch seems to bring it back to life. Sometimes moving my hands enough will also get the job done, but not always. It’s really behaving more like a motion sensor at this point than a presence sensor when sitting at the desk near the corner of the room. I looked at the parameters and it seems like the default is such that it should have the highest level of sensitivity. I’m not sure if I missed a setting that would help make the switch work more reliably for that situation but would appreciate some help.
I’m seeing the exact same thing. I’m sitting down reading community messages and after a bit, my switch turns off. I can confirm in Hubitat that it stopped detecting motion, though there is definitely motion (breathing, small head movements, typing, etc.). If I wave my hands, it detects motion again.
I’m sitting down facing the switch at about 8 feet, and am roughly 3 foot below it. I need to move my hands about 1.5 feet back and forth once before motion is detected again. Less than that and it doesn’t detect motion. I wonder if this is a configuration or a switch issue? It is set to it’s maximum sensitivity.
I’m hoping it’s a configuration issue, but to your point, it seems like it comes default with highest sensitivity and I couldn’t immediately find anything to make it more sensitive. It may be possible to fix this as a software update too I suppose. But would love to hear from the team on whether or not this is known and if anything can be done about it.
This morning, my son reported a similar issue with another of my Z-Wave mmWave switches. @EricM_Inovelli, is there a possibility that the sensitivity of the Z-Wave switches is not set correctly in the firmware somehow? I’m on FW version 2 (the one that it came with).
These switches work by sending out a radar signal then measuring how long it takes to bounce back and how strong the signal is at different times to get distance to objects. Then on the next signal it uses change of distance to objects to detect motion. The radar signal reduces by the inverse square meaning that you double the distance and you get 1/4 the signal strength.
The sensor they are using, and basically all others I could find, say they can detect presence up to 1.5m or about 5ft. Anything past that and the signal bouncing off you starts to get too weak to pick up the smallest motion.
With this in mind, if you are in an empty room 15ft away facing the switch it will probably be able to pick up your chest moving when you breath and detect your presence. However, if you are 6ft away in a room with a lot of things reflecting back the radar making for a noisy signal and you have your back to the switch effectively hiding your chest moving when you breath, the switch is going to have a hard time detecting you.