This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Fragrant-Coast5355 on 2026-05-12 14:31:28+00:00.
https://i.redd.it/ycal3hktqp0h1.gif
I have 11 Aqara FP2 presence sensors in my apartment today and they form the backbone of my smart home automation: lights fading on and off, turning on the extractor fan and towel heater in the bathroom, turn-on-alarm notifications, etc. They are amazing, but they're also full of bugs: people in bed disappear, ghosts are common, targets get stuck. I installed them knowing they were pretty bad but that at some stage something better would arrive and I'd be able to replace them.
So I was very excited to read about the Everything Presence Pro sensor which combines:
- a motion sensor (for fast initial detection),
- a target sensor for tracking 3 targets as they move through the room (but which can lose targets when they're still), and
- a static sensor that detects ongoing presence even if the target is still
These three sensors combined allow you to:
- react instantly when somebody enters the room, eg turning on the main lights
- react when the person enters a zone of interest, eg when the person climbs into bed we can turn off the main lights and turn the reading lights on at a low level
- react when the last person leaves the room, or prevent reactions if somebody is still in the room, eg not turning the lights back on while somebody else is in bed
Unfortunately, the zone configurator and firmware left me frustrated and disappointed, for a few reasons:
- Noise: The target sensor feeds back raw X,Y coordinates which are noisy, so targets jump around.
- Distortion: The radar's native view is distorted, so straight walls don't appear straight. That makes laying out a room tricky.
- Limited zones: It has only four detection zones and two exclusion zones, all of which are rectangular and aligned with the sensor. Combined with the distortion problem above, it makes it very hard to lay out a room realistically.
- Coarse detection: A target is either in a zone or it isn't. There's no way to express where it came from (the doorway vs. mid-room), how long it's been there, or how long since it last moved, which matters when someone is asleep.
- Resolution mismatch: The configurator can draw at 5 cm precision but actually the target sensor resolution is 32 cm.
- Chattiness: Every device streams high volumes of coordinate updates that Home Assistant mostly discards. With 10–15 sensors that adds up quickly.
But of course, this is open source! So I decided to see whether I could build something I liked more.
Today I'm releasing version 1 of Everything Presence Pro Grid, which allows you to map your room on a 20 x 20 grid that you can paint to assign cells to different zones. It is designed to work out of the box but still gives you access to the internal knobs when you need it.
Github Repo: https://github.com/clintongormley/everything-presence-pro-grid/
Documentation: https://clintongormley.github.io/everything-presence-pro-grid/
What this integration does differently:
- Perspective-corrected grid: A four-corner calibration wizard maps the radar view onto your actual room. Walls are straight, and zones line up with real-world geometry. Cells are 30 cm × 30 cm (1 ft × 1 ft).
- Seven painted zones, plus an eighth "Rest of room" fallback: Zones are polygonal, can be discontinuous, and are drawn by clicking grid cells.
- Zone types: Bundle sensible thresholds and timeouts for each kind of area (e.g. bed, transit, rest, etc), so a bed zone can hold presence for minutes while a hallway zone clears in seconds. The Custom type exposes the underlying parameters.
- Cross-zone target tracking: Targets are followed as they move from one zone to another, so the handoff between zones is clean and fast.
- Overlays for refining detection: Mark doorways with Entry/Exit overlays, and noise sources with Interference or Suppress overlays.
- Furniture layout: Drop furniture stickers on the grid so the live overview is easy to read.
- On-chip processing: Home Assistant gets a single Occupancy binary sensor plus per-zone presence sensors, instead of a constant stream of target coordinates. Home Assistant only receives the updates you're interested in.
- Position smoothing: Brief radar jitter is filtered out before it reaches the zone engine, so zones don't flap when a target is near a boundary.
- Auto-dismiss for stuck targets: A target reported at exactly the same coordinates for several minutes is automatically dropped, so a phantom the radar got fixated on stops keeping a zone occupied.
- Built-in flasher: Install and update firmware from the panel.
Hopefully others will find this useful, and I would love to hear what you think. If you do give it a go you will need to replace the firmware on the device, but it is easy to restore the original firmware should you decide to go back.