Awesome Presence Sensor - mmwave & PIR - esphome

This is a custom presence detector I made that is meant to be similar to the Everything Presence One. The components are roughly $20 before shipping/tax.

It has the following components in it:

• Seeed esp32c3
• mmwave ld2410b sensor (I purchased the version without a header - maybe get the version with headers!)
• Panasonic EKMC1603113 PIR sensor
• 4mm countersunk M3 screws to attach the mount

I wired it up to the Seeed like this:

• ld2410b
  • vcc (pin1) → 5v
  • gnd (pin2) → gnd
  • rx (pin3) → D3
  • tx (pin4) → D2
  • out → none
• EKMC1603113
  • vcc → 5v
  • gnd → gnd
  • out → D6

Esphome config for Home Assistant: https://pastebin.com/WfHhwpqn

The “Combined Presence Sensor” entity will show up in Home Assistant for this device. That is a template sensor that will trigger when the PIR senses movement, and will turn off 15s after there is no more presence detected via the mmwave sensor. You can modify this 15s cooldown value via $combined_presence_delay_off. There's also a PIR delay on/off that are similarly customizable to help filter out false triggers.

This also includes the code for Bluetooth proxy, so you’ll automatically be improving your Bluetooth connectivity into home assistant when you plug these in around your home.

You can grab various mount options from the official Everything Presence One case, or just use some of that 3m type sticky tape.

Additionally, you must calibrate the LD2410 sensor. You can find the calibration instructions at the LD2410 ESPHome documentation.

Note: If you have intermittent PIR readings, there are a few things you can do. You can add capacitors as described in Q2-16 of Panasonic's technical documentation to stabilize the 5V signal. More importantly, however, is to move the Wi-Fi antenna as far away from the PIR sensor as possible. I've had good results attaching it externally on the case on the bottom part of the back of the case. When I had this antenna inside the case, I had false triggers every few minutes.

Additional Note: I was still having major PIR issues with this where I was getting false triggers every 15 minutes or so on one of my devices. I ended up putting a small square piece (1" or so square) of foil inside the case in-between the PIR sensor and the esp32, and these have completely gone away. I had already used heat shrink on all exposed wires inside the case, so the foil is not at risk of shorting any connections.