Everything Presence One Sensor Review

I recently received two Everything Presence One Sensors from the Everything Smart Home YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@EverythingSmartHome). I was quite lucky to get them as during the ordering process back in December, as I had a bit of a cock-up on the credit card front and couldn't put the payment though. Oddly a few hours later I got an email from the site, asking me if I'd like to pay. A change of location and PC later and I had succesfully paid, which is cool, considering they sold out pretty quick.

Fast forward to March and I recieved two sensors plus cases. It comes with a 3D printed case (with mounting stand), a main board, a PIR sensor and a Millimeter Wave sensor.

It is a well made custom made board, with the nice option to mount the Millimeter Wave sensor in one of two directions. Assembly is simple to anyone who has successfully put together an MFI wardrobe.

 The assembled sensor looks like this:

It looks quite neat.

To setup, it is a case of plugging in a USB-C to a PC. Annoyingly USB-C is the type of cable I have the least number of. I have a mountain of micro USB cables from all the dead mobile phones I have owned, but I had to nick a USB-C cable off my phone temporarily.

Set up is done through a web browser (either Chome or the Microsoft one that 5 people in the world use), in the same way as recent ESP Home installs. I ended up getting hold of the portable version of Chrome, which worked fine.

The first option you get is to download the latest software for the sensor, this is pretty painless. Then comes the bit I had problems with. The connection to the wireless network. Now my home network setup is a "bit" complex. I have three separate Wifi networks, one for main, one for guest and one for IoT devices. All of them are on separate VLANs and the IoT network is very heavily restricted. Internet access for this network is largely blocked, mainly to stop those naughty Wemo/TP-Link devices from going off to the internet and getting unwanted feature-removing software "updates". Also nothing on the IoT VLAN can talk to any of the other VLANs unless specifically allowed.

I spent quite a while trying to get the sensor to connect to the wireless network, doing several software reinstall wipes in the process. I could only finally got it to work when I created a new wireless network with out any of the security. The key change this time, was that the network wasn't hidden. I have several other ESP32 devices connected to my network and from memory there is a setting I had to set to allow it to talk to hidden networks. So at present I have two IOT networks, whilst I workout my next step.

When connected to the network you can then go on to the next step in the process, which is adding the device to Home Assistant (there is also an option to add it Smart things, if you are a fan of that particular method of torture). The Home Assistant setup is done through the My Home Assistant setup and is releatively painless. When that is done, you have an additional device under the "ESPHome" integrations.

All of the elements of the sensor work well, though the MMWave sensor is really sensitive. Quite amazing the such a a cheap consumer component. Some of tweaking the settings will be needed, as it has previously picked up motion in an empty house. This could be it picking up microscopic movements in things like the curtains, or my house is haunted. But, I can see it working well, especially in a bedroom for picking up the presence of sleeping people.

In conclusion this is a good device, if a little fussy about my wireless network.

I believe that there is ESPHome code available, so this may be user fixable.