Excellent works! I learned so much from you in the past week looking into Home Assistant. Thank you!

Just wanted to say thanks for putting this video together. I had an ESP32 laying around so I went the ESPHome route with the config from your site and I just got it working!

Just stopping by to say your videos rock, I've watched them all and they've helped me improve my HA setup. Super easy to follow, always pretty witty and just a good ol time. Thank you for taking the time to make these videos and educate some of us on how to improve our automations and homes!

Love this. would never had thought of using the leak sensor!

I followed your recommendations and it works perfectly. Thanks!

First when i started with ESPHome, I thought it was really hard to understand. But once i got into it, it was easier than i expected. 😀 Thank you for a great video as always!

Thanks for the great video! I have build it myself with ESPHome and I found that the "delayed_on_off" filter works much better than "delayed_on" and "delayed_off" because "delayed_on_off" is intended to debounce binary switches, while the others are intended to debounce push buttons.

Now i can finally make a "Whoopie cushion" for HA .... lol

That a good alternative use for the leak detector, I've used one like this as a rain detector connected to a rain sensor board. You can of course also use a lower cost window/door sensor just by by-passing the reed switch. I use such a device to detect when my front door is locked (not closed ... . actually locked).

FWIW the mat you chose was an alarm mat. That means the other 2 wires you could not figure out what they were, were the break-detect lines. All alarm equipment have them, from door switches to PIR sensors. It basically ensures the integrity of the alarm state should someone tamper with the sensor. Cool vid and yes ESP devices can be a very easy and low power way to set up smart sensors.

I have several ESPHome devices. One is a small relay based on a Sonoff SV that unlocks the main security door with a toggle that keeps it powered for 5 seconds then releases. This door would normally be controlled via a push button on the intercom system, but I use it as a remote control so I don't need to worry about finding my key all the time for the common area doors. I also have several LED Strips, analogue and digital, that are controlled via ESPHome. I originally was using Tasmota on the door relay, but found ESPHome to be an easier option to maintain within Home Assistant.

The other 2 wires are for a security loop, when used in alarm systems. They are powered from the alarm system and will 'always' be live unless the wires to the mat are cut, alerting the alarm system to a problem with that sensor.

Can’t wait to try this!

Sounds like a great use for a mm wave sensor.

Haha. I'll take this video off my list that I was going to do shortly 😅 Great video.

I use ESPHome for almost everything. I now use about 130 different ones, ranging from controlling an LED strip to ESPs that have different sensors attached to them, but now also several with a Tuya chipset that I have flashed to get them from the cloud. .

I am using an Esphome device with an infrared receiver and an emitter to control the Air Conditioned with the "climate" module. It even detects when I control the Ac via the remote control and the settings are sent to HomeAssistant!

Brilliant mate !!

I'm using an Aqara door sensor with a (much smaller) pressure mat. My goal was to have the nightstand light on when I wake up at night, but there are too much false positives and the light will turn on randomly during my sleep. Of course for this purpose I cannot use long delays, in fact in my automation the light will turn on after 2 seconds of "bed not occupied", otherwise I should stand still to wait for the light to turn on before moving away from the bed. So I use the sensor for the mornin wake up routine: if I'm not out of the bed after 10 minutes from the routine start, my bedroom light will turn on and the echo dot clock (playing my favorite radio station) volume will go up.

Great video! Am going to try this out. The method using Aqara's water leak sensor is a good approach but I do also like the ESP32 option. The only drawback is that the ESP32 would need to be powered via USB.. unlike Aqara's water leak sensor on CR32 batt.

I made an accent/night light in my bathroom which turns on via motion sensor and adjust brightness based on time of day. I also made an IR receiver which listens for specific buttons on my TV remote which the TV doesn't actually respond to. My TV remote has a numpad and so far as I can tell it is not used at all by the TV. I programmed HA to do various things like turn on or off lights in the area of that box, convenient diy universal remote for when you just sat down and forgot to turn the light off and you have the remote in your hand

I'm using ESPHome with an ultrasonic sensor in my water softener to give me the raw distance to the top of the salt pellets, then calculate the used and remaining height in cm and % of salt used vs remaining. I also used the same setup to measure the amount of water in the Christmas tree reservoir and sent alerts when it got too low.

Really useful thanks

This was great - I got set up in an afternoon following your guide and now have the alarm automatically arm and lights shut off for these. Still trying to figure out the right positioning for the pads. Has anyone done any adjustment to sensitivity for heavier mattresses? If not may build a container around the mat to alleviate some pressure

I’ve been using it for approximately a month now and it’s been awesome so far! I’m using the Aqara method and using the sensor to only trigger the waking up automations like turning on the lights and blasting the alarm and lifting the shades only when I am already in bed.. and it doesn’t turn off the lights and keeps annoying me with the alarm until I get out of bed (eliminating the spaming snooze dilemma 😅) But lately I’ve been facing an issue where it stays on occupied even when I get up, and then I’ll have to hit the mat multiple times until it gets fixed.. it’s like the mat gets bent down and the circuit stays closed for some reason.. any ideas how I might fix it?

Love this leak sensor idea to make it zigbee compatible. I actually already had a very cheap zigbee leak sensor I wasn't using that had two contact prongs on the end. I cut that off to expose the wires and they can then be connected to the pressure pad. Benefit of this is that the prong was on a long wire so it's more flexible where I place the zigbee transmitter.

Here's an idea for your next project: try using 60GHz mmwave sensor to monitor your breathing/heartbeat while asleep, since you already have the contraption under your bed ;-)

I went the half load cell method, turns the bed into a massive weighing scale so you can work out if it's just you, the wife or both in bed and run different automations

Nice video

I plan to use ESPHome for multiple different things like: - Water leak detection - CO2 fill grade and leakage detection for the water dispencer - Bed occupancy - Irrigation/Sprinkler system - Parcel and Letter box - Weather station (with multiple sensors including lightning detection, rain, wind, temp, uv etc) - Air quality (Airrohr, Sensor Community) - Air freshener - BT proxy for radoneye and for sure more upcomming. ESPHome is a great system with a huge amount of possibilities. Sometimes at smart homes you have to think about possible data and how to interpretate them like my temperature sensors at water pipes to detect if somebody uses the shower or bathtube.

Using the leak sensors as the trigger is genious. I'd be tempted to set this up except worried that on a date night, if the dog walked into the room, it'd have a seizure with the lights strobing off and on (/j)

Didn't know this was even possible!

Nice video. Question, if I put the pressure sensor between my mattress and box spring, won't the weight of mattress trigger the pressure sensor on all the time?

I really enjoy your content. Also it comes in the perfect moment for me, as I bought a bunch of ESP8266 D1 mini for a BME280 and stuff. How would you take care of the power for the ESP? Usually I'd love to rebuild the ESP version but having several cables under my bed sounds a bit unsafe to me.

Hey, also used those mats (sensor) under our bed and they worked quite a while. But after some months the triggered fals alarms or dont go from occupied to unoccupied sometimes. Now i am using two FSR stripes and ADC meassuring, but also have sometimes issues with fals triggers (after making bed...). I think the holes between the wood "destroying" them over time with the person weight on top. I think a solution would be to use some sort of thin plastic under the pressure mat to support it and not squeeze it into the holes between the wood. Do you guy's have those issues with the mat? What do you think about the idea? thx

Honestly have just started with esphome, about to reconfigure 3 devices I built and one Tuya device I rechipped to esp yet programmed all to Tasmota. Then learned Tasmota needed MQTT... then learned I was running Container HA.... Then pulled a Nuk off the shelf, fought the HA OS install to get on the M2 with live disk.. Now just starting on ESPHOME or any other plugins. Want cloud free as much as I can, but it's a learning curve for someone with "Basic" skills... No I really mean the last programming language I learned played the theme to MASH over the PC speaker in DOS.. 30 years of catching up.

Great video. I started with door sensor but the batter didn’t last long. Am no using your ESPHome method which is working great. Does any one knows a way to turn off the power LED?

I have the even more expensive sensor option. We own a Select Comfort SleepNumber bed and HA has an integration for their SleepIQ app. I do find that due to movements I can't rely on the occupancy state. Just thinking out loud, but in order to 'filter' the state (like you demo with the esphome sensor), I need to increase the "Duration" in the Automation for both both state changes.

The other two wires are used to form a tamper loop for a wired intruder mode.

At the moment i use ESP for a M5 stack with voice assist a bluetooth proxy & everything presence one.

hope the future sensor comes discounted with a factor for humper bed 😉

How you close your curtain? I have one of the manual models, but mine is covering the entire window, instead of installed on the window space.

I never thought that flood sensors could be used like that. in the end it's just a capacitive sensor actually.

How does this work with a heavy mattress? Would it constantly be on?

Which power cable do you recommend for the ESP32?

If you run your HA on a pi, you could also hardwire it using the raspberry pi's GPIO pins and make a binary sensor. That way you could make one dirt cheap

I clicked on the link to pressure sensor in your blog article and it's already listed as unavailable on Amazon. What other sensors would work?

I've got a 4 switch box near my keyboard with an ESP8266 running ESPHome. One switch is set to toggle both of my Pi-Hole instances on or off (some website comments sections are blocked by Pi-Hole). The other switches control my WLED lights through Home Assistant.

Use velostat (Linqstat) more cheaper, more accurate and more flexible and finally you have choice to measure how much pressure as well!! (with ESPhome project)

I ordered 2 defender doormats to pair with the aqara sensors, but they only trigger when I'm standing on them.. A slight push or laying on my bed with the sensors underneath doesnt do anything. Any ideas?

Great writeup / video! Just having a play with one and find that it works when I get into bed but then thinks I get out when I lay down. I am guessing positioning is important - it looks like you have yours folded over -0 is that the key? Cheers!

This is very interesting and I've been wanting a bed sensor. The part i wished you covered was why this method over a load cell? For example how does this work eith say a heavy bed?

Ventil aktuator er nok det mest korrekte navn. Jeg har haft en siddende i 6-7 år, fungere perfekt, og har massere af kræfter. Det er så udgaven uden nogen kontroller (styres bare med 12v direkte, men har microswitches til endestop). Det var den eneste jeg kunne få for under 80kr fra Kina, den gang det var beløbs grænsen 😆

Hi Mate, great vid! I have a question though :) bed is not only for sleeping right? So how those sensors react when there are 2 person on one side of the bed in jumping motion? :> And how sensitive is it, I have 2 cats and I'm curious if they would trigger it.

When you place the mattress on the sensor, doesn't it just trigger anyway? Or is there a way of fine tuning how much pressure is required?

My immediate thought when I saw this was about a system we tried to use for an elderly relative that lives on their own. To be clear, it is not Aqara based an had very few settings and none that we could tweak ourselves. It only allowed us to specify when the person should be in bed and when they should be getting out of bed. If they went to bed earlier that was fine and if they got up in the night and returned within an acceptable window of time then that was fine too. If they did not go to bed on time or they got up in the night and stayed out of bed then an alarm was triggered with a call centre. The problem was that it was not 100% reliable and would give false positives meaning the call centre would call the house in the night only to wake up the occupant. Getting to 100% reliability with elderly care is very nearly impossible but false positive (and indeed worse false negatives) are a nightmare and we gave up on that system. I'm more tempted by the millimeter wave presence sensors that Aqara makes but even those cannot be 100% accurate so then it might need to be a combination of sensors, pressure, millimeter wave, and possibly something that could go under the bed legs to weigh the bed.

Sweet 👏

I am wondering if it is somehow possible to tell which person is on which side based on weight difference? Are there alternatives to these pressure mats that can actually differentiate by weight rather than just on or off?

I use ESPHOME to get the water levels of my swimming pond and water tank using pressure sensors. Also outdoor and pond water temperatures. I get co2 values around the house to determine how hard my ventilation system should work. I have light sensors, buttons, humidity sensors, the built in Bluetooth captures the i go from my xiaomi scale... Esphome can do it all! How do you power your esp32 bed sensor? Usb power plug or battery?

Question: if you place the pressure mat underneath a mattress, won't the weight of the mattress trigger the pressure mat sensor mistakenly sending a message that someone is on bed?

3:00 the other two wires are there for the tamper alarm

I have had plans to create such a sensor. for a long time. I just don't know how I'm going to integrate it into smartthings. There does seem to be a way to put an ESP 32 into the smart home platform, but I have. not had time to try it out. It seems kind of confusing. If you have any ideas, I'd be happy to hear.

I'm confused, wont the weight of the bed itself will trigger the pressure mats? can I control the sensitivity?

Great video. Love the idea of repurposing Aqara leak sensors for this! Does anyone know where to source the mat in Canada without overpaying? Not available on Amazon here and Google searches result in webstores with zero stock or eBay listings with 1000% markups lol. Direct purchase from the manufacturer (Switch Electronics, linked in article) is a great price, but the shipping costs are way too high for a single unit.

Maybe add a moisture sensor too.

How sensitive are these? I have a dog and a cat. Dog weighs about 45lbs and they both sleep on my bed so I expect I would get a lot of false triggers

Does the sensor not trigger when a heavy mattress is placed upon it?

Hi, link for pressure mat please... Thanks!

I'm using ESPHome to convert a dumb doorbell into a smart doorbell

I wish esp home and esp presence could be merged 😊

Is it better to use an Aqara contact sensor rather than a leak detector?

As a alarm engineer of 35 years , I would not trust the pressure mats to be reliable over a period of time., The industry does not allow them, All they are are 2 layers of foil seperated by a thin layer of foam with holes in, that allow the 2 foil layers to connect together. The life time will be severly reduced with them draped over the bed latts as the foil will be folded at that point. Great use case though, I use water leak sensors too, to get the lock / unlock status of our cars

Why expensive pressure pad and not MM wave ESP32?

What if my purpose in bed is not sleeping?

Can it detect an unknown person in a bed? 😀

But sometimes you go to bed but still need light to read for exemple ...

Of course you make a bed sensor self-powered by er, "movements".

I read "bad" sensor 😂

Please teach us how to make the in bed helper for 30 minutes. This is something what isn't well documented.

Pressure mats are not good. They eventually compress and give false positives. Use an FSR instead.

first

Does someone found this ? I cant found it anywhere on internet. large pressure mat alarm switch pad 720x390

would it work with a diy pressure pad :0 , these ones are really hard to find here soo i was wondering if i made a simple one like kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mZyCi9hh1b-5hn0.html

Question about bed pressure sensors which I have been wondering for a while... how do you automate it but not have it trigger when you and your partner are having "fun time"?

That mat has questionable reviews

Any decent mattress makes this useless as the pressure is never enough to close the circuit. If the circuit closes, your mattress is shit mate and it will hurt your back sooner or later ;)

May I suggest that you also include the buymeacoffee method of supporting you? I'd like to give you a little gesture of appreciation, but the superthanks stuff is too complicated.

Systematic experimentation is pretty scientific 🤔 Not very professional though [/youtube_wanker_mode] Very interesting video and one on the todo list!