Aqara's FP2 offers better presence but is not a panacea

May 8, 2023 by Stacey Higginbotham 6 Comments

This story was originally published in my weekly newsletter on May 5, 2023. To subscribe, visit www.staceyoniot.com/newsletter.

Currently it feels like every element of the smart home is getting me down. This week on the podcast, I admitted that Matter has been a huge disappointment all around, as it’s making life not easier but more complicated for folks trying to buy smart home devices. And at home, during my test of the much-anticipated Aqara FP2 presence sensor, I found myself frustrated by the lack of interoperability between what was the most promising device I saw at CES and my existing smart home gear.

I want to give up on Aqara’s $82.99 sensor, but instead I’ll just lay out which aspects of it work and which ones don’t. In short, this device works well in its own ecosystem, but when paired with other smart home ecosystems it performs pretty much like any old motion sensor. Which means that unless you are in deep with Aqara gear, you’re not going to get most of the value this device has to offer.

The FP2 is a dedicated millimeter wave presence detection sensor. To detect bodies in a space, it uses radio frequencies (RF) as opposed to infrared, as most current motion detection devices do. This enables it to offer finer resolution, detect multiple people in a room, and detect gestures, including falls. I’ll talk about fall detection specifically in the second story.

All of which translates into a presence sensor that can theoretically be used for use cases such as detecting where a person is in a room and using their nearness to a door, a bed, or a reading chair to trigger an action. It might also be used to trigger an event (or avoid triggering one) when multiple people are in a space. And for fun, it includes a lux sensor that detects the brightness of light in a room.

So with the right gear and this sensor, you could set up an automation that — as long as no one is within a pre-defined sensor zone, like a bed — opens the blinds at a certain time. Or you could trigger lights to automatically come on in a room if people are in the room and the brightness in that room hits a specific threshold.

This is pretty powerful stuff for automations, and I’d love to be able to take advantage of it. But I can’t. And here’s where the smart home’s lack of interoperability strikes again. The sensor works with Apple’s Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT, and an open source digital assistant called Alice. But only some of the functionality is carried over to each of these platforms.

I tested the Aqara with Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and IFTTT. Unfortunately, Google Home recognized the device in the Home app, but I couldn’t do anything with it when it came time to try to build a routine. That may be because Google is in the process of beta testing a new version of the Home app with support for more deep sensor capabilities, but it was still frustrating. Although according to Aqara’s website, I should be able to use the multi-zone presence with Google Home, I couldn’t see how. Maybe it will arrive after I/O next week. Notably, Google doesn’t support the light sensing or fall detection.

Next, I tried to use the sensor with Amazon Alexa and got a little further. I was able to set up the sensor in my bedroom (more on the set-up process in a moment) and delineate a zone that represented the bed. After linking the Aqara FP2 with Alexa, I could use presence in both my bedroom and the bed area as triggers.

So I set up a routine to turn off the lamp in the living room when two people were in the bed area. When my husband and I tried it, the lamp turned off within a second or two. It also triggered consistently. That said, neither the brightness sensing capabilities of the sensor nor fall detection are supported by Alexa.

But with IFTTT, I found I could do a lot more, such as use light levels and motion triggers together to trigger an action. I can also set time parameters, so if I want to trigger lights to turn on when a person is detected and light levels are low but avoid doing that in the middle of the night, I can set the trigger to work only between the hours of 6 am and 10 pm. But unlike the other two, IFTTT requires a subscription.

So if these very real and very frustrating limitations don’t bother you, then let’s talk about the process of setting the sensor up, how it performs, as well as some of its other limitations.

Aqara is a Chinese company, and there are some awkwardly phrased elements in the app, but nothing that an English-speaking user wouldn’t be able understand. I also had to go into my profile to change the time zone to reflect daylight savings time, as it was turned off by default. Getting the time zone right matters if you use the app to try to set those time barriers.

Before installing the sensor, know that if you want to use it for presence sensing and multi-zone detection you won’t be able to use it for fall detection. And you’ll either need to install it on a wall or set it up on a stable surface near the edge of a room. From there, it will start sensing presence right away.

You can also go into the app to set up different areas of a room as special zones. Creating the zones is easy. Simply enter editing mode and then start using your finger to color in squares that will delineate the zone. To create my zone, I walked around my bed, noting where the person-shaped icon in the room was.

The sensor needs to be installed about 6 feet off the floor for best results. Once installed it can detect presence in a range of about 20 feet from the sensor edge, which is pretty significant. And you can tailor both the room depth and sensor orientation in the app. I sometimes got an artifact of two people icons when using the app, like there were two people in the room instead of one, but it didn’t seem to trigger automations that required two people in the room. So it was likely a glitch.

Another glitch was the ability to reliably detect presence to trigger automations in different rooms. In my bedroom it did well detecting people, but when I moved it downstairs to the larger family room, it suffered a bit with reliability. Sometimes I questioned whether the app had simply frozen.

I did find the zones to be pretty sophisticated, and the ones I created with Alexa as a way to trigger events worked without a hitch. Lights turned on when I was within about a foot of the outlined space and turned off less than a minute after I left. I had to create two separate automations for that with Alexa.

Sometimes my dog set off the presence detection, and sometimes she did not, which was a little frustrating. The Aqara website does say that it will release a pet filtering option via an over-the-air update, but it’s not clear when that might happen. My dog is a fluffy 20-pound mutt that stands about 16 inches tall, so it’s not as if she’s anywhere close to human-sized when tagged with a radar.

Other issues to note include the fact that this device needs power, so it must be plugged in. That isn’t a big deal if the sensor is sitting on a shelf or mounted on a wall, but if you want to use it to detect falls, it needs to be mounted on the ceiling, which does lead to a less attractive setup. Someone asked me if they could point the FP2 outside in order to detect wildlife, but the mmWave signals don’t pass through glass, so that’s not an option. Aqara says the FP2 is safe for use in humid environments, like bathrooms and under covered porches, but I didn’t test that claim.

Overall, my testing showed a device that has a lot of potential. But for now, that potential is limited to those with Aqara gear in their homes or those with a paid IFTTT account. You can get some of the value associated with delineating certain zones using Alexa, but it seems like a lot to pay for that privilege.

This story was updated on May 9 to correct an error. The FP2 is not the first dedicated mmWave sensor.

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Filed Under: Featured, Reviews Tagged With: Amazon, Aqara, Aqara FP2, google, IFTTT, Siri

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