Something about those two examples is driving me nuts. It becomes very busy on the lower edge and nothing has any kind of symmetry between them. It’s a difficult problem to solve, because the paddle is offset and you already have the offset air-gap switch. I don’t know that centering it would make it any better… do you center on overall switch dimensions or paddle?
It might be worth asking if you can make the config button translucent and serve double purpose as a button and the window for the lux sensor.
Typical not. The material used in the paddle typically wont attenuate the signal. Now if the paddle was made of aluminum or steel, it wouldn’t see much.
It’s probably early for this, but are there plans to have the ability for the switch to do hardware based occupancy/vacancy switching? Or is the plan to have it all controlled via the hub?
I think hardware based might be nice… but it opens up a ton more options that would need to be added in firmware, that might mean you need a bigger storage chip than normal:
Honestly haven’t thought too much about all of the capabilities yet as we just presented initial concepts to the manufacturer, but I’d love to get ahead of the curve to understand what really can be done w/mmWave, so I’m glad we’re having this conversation now!
Seems like you’re somewhat familiar with what mmWave can do? Maybe you can help us!
I’ve talked to a couple of experts in the field and they’ve given me a high level look and have volunteered to help us, but the more the merrier as I want to hit this out of the park on the first go around rather than having the competition come out with something better in a year or so.
From what I understand, there are a couple of ways to go about this:
Have basic motion/presence built into the switch where the switch can tell when someone enters, and is present
Have the above, but also add the ability to understand how many people are there and also what rooms they are in depending on how many switches you have throughout the house
#1 would be the easiest route (and less expensive) and we would rely on a hub to do the processing for #2.
My preference would be to handle it that way to keep the price competitive and work with hub manufacturers to work on a “security package” where, if using multiple switches, the system can determine who is where, if someone is sneaking (or snuck) out, etc.
It just so happens that we are working with a hub manufacturer on something very similar and one of the other reasons why this project is gaining a lot of attention.
Not who you were asking and far from an expert, but depending on the sensitivity and frequency used for the specific implementation (and the amount of horsepower you can spend interpreting the data) mmWave can be used to track breathing rate and heartrate.
Personally, for one built into a light switch, I would settle for simple “motion”/“no motion” and don’t need fancy occupancy counts. The most I would really want for a light switch application is maybe “direction of motion” ( towards, away, left-to-right, top-to-bottom, etc) and estimated distance a moving object is from the sensor, or maybe “amount” or “strength” of motion (mostly to make it easier to ignore slight movement from wind or whatever). IMO none of those are critical features and are mostly just “nice to haves”.
I think if you need a mmWave sensor to give you a count of people in a single room you probably want something more sophisticated than something built into a light switch (and probably better control over placement/direction that you would get from a light switch anyway).
Overall fast and reliable presence detection would be my highest requirement for a mmwave sensor but would be willing to pay a bit more for one that could tell how many without comprimising speed and reliability. It would be really cool to use that data in a hub to do weighted averages of temperature throughout the house based on the amount of people in the room.I definatly am ready to buy at least 1 10 pack maybe more to outfit the entire house
I agree having the occupancy & vacancy modes is an absolute must-have. The Jasco switches have that. @Eric_Inovelli, I would also like to make sure we’re talking about a SWITCH that can control a FAN load.
Super-useful for me because the motion switches (NOT DIMMERS) are powering the bathroom fans and are set to vacancy mode to turn off fans after 15 minutes of no motion (done on the switch itself). The motion/no motion status is also independently reported and used by the hub to control lights on separate z-wave switches.
Good reminder – just when I thought we could fast track this bad boy and hopefully use the current UL number for the 2-1… we’ll have to add the fan UL. Bummer haha. But yes, I would imagine a lot of these would be in bathrooms, so definitely we’d want to add the additional UL certification for exhaust fans.
Dang, that’s insane…
Awesome, yeah that’s what I’m thinking most people would really want. The ability to detect presence and motion is already a huge win and improvement over PIR, but yes, I do like the direction of motion, strength of motion, etc ask too. I think that’s important.
Oooo, that is an interesting use case… Hmmm… Crap, I really like this idea haha.
