KS200M's motion sensor

[zyberwoof]

I just got a new Kasa KS200M. It's a light switch with a motion/occupancy sensor. The device seems to work great, and I was able to get it into Home Assistant without issue since Kasa was already integrated.

The issue is that Home Assistant just shows entities for the switch and its status LED light. It doesn't offer any integration with the motion sensor built into the device.

Is this something that will likely be added with a future update to HA? Being a non-developer, Is there anything I can do to help?

P. S. This is just a friendly inquiry.
P. P. S. Kasa also recently released ES20M. It's like my KS200M, but with dimming. I'm hoping any work to add motion sensing to the KS200M would also apply to the ES20M.

[rytilahti]

Take a look at #268 – there's a preliminary implementation for the interfaces in the modularize development branch (#278) that exposes their configuration & the current brightness for the model which has this feature. Alas, I don't think the device reports information about detected motions but I may be wrong on that.

[Chief-Parrott]

@rytilahti - Realizing this convo is a few months old, hoping someone is still monitoring and might be able to look into something.

I just got a few ES20M switches and was hoping for some way to use the motion sensor as a trigger in HA. Was disappointed to find that TP-Link themselves don't seem to have seen fit to expose the PIR sensor state directly.

Digging around, I found the motion.py module and the several fixture modules for the motion sensing switches, and I'm wondering if there's something there that might be used to effectively determine the motion sensor state.

All of the motion sensor switch fixtures have a field in smartlife.iot.PIR named cold_time that seems to have a default value of 600000.

Has anyone tested to see if cold_time gets set to 0 (or at least, some observable, very low value as compared to 600000), when the PIR sensor is activated by motion? This may or may not require that Motion be enabled on the switch.

My theory is that cold_time might be indicative of "time since PIR sensor was last triggered". If so, and assuming that value is in milliseconds, "60000" would mean "more than one minute ago" and anything less would be the amount of time since last triggered, e.g., "5000" if last triggered five seconds ago.

If tested and that is found to be the case, I think cold_time could be potentially be used as a proxy for an actual PIR state report.

The follow-on to that, is whether cold_time is sent as an unsolicited report, or would have to be polled. Async report would obviously be ideal, as it should be close to real-time. But even if it had to be polled at some interval, it would still prove useful for many applications.

If any of that is the case and can be implemented, I'm hoping that would somehow, someday find its way into Home Assistant.

I'd try to contribute, but having any programming skills at all is a very recent thing and my confidence is not great.
That said, I might still give it a shot if no one else has time to look into it.

[rytilahti]

These devices do not send unsolicited notifications (at least not locally, maybe to the cloud service?), so polling is the only option for local communications to my knowledge.

Considering that you have some devices, you could perform a query just after triggering motion to see if the value changes. But based on all feedback it seems unlikely that the cold_time is something useful as it would have been reported by someone already. Feel free to experiment with it though, you can pass --debug to the cli tool to make it display the raw device responses so something like this could be used to experiment with it: kasa --host <addr> --type dimmer --debug

[Chief-Parrott]

Thanks for the command line example. Turns out that cold_time does not, in fact, change when motion is detected at PIR. Which is disappointing.

As much as I want to like the Kasa bulbs and switches, it just seems like they don't provide enough status or control to do what I want in order to replace another, aging lighting system that unfortunately isn't well supported anymore.

Thanks for your insight and assistance!