THIRDREALITY Smart Presence Sensor R3, 60GHz mmWave Radar, USB-C Powered, RGB Light with Status Indication, Illumination Sensor, Zigbee Repeater, Compatible with Home Assistant(ZHA&Z2M), SmartThings

Adies and Gentledoos, it is here. The Good: - It accurately senses *presence*, even when I'm sitting still at my home office - It has all of the features of the night light - It has amazing new features I did not expect! - It is super easy to pair and use The Bad: - It is not a 1for1 replacement for the night light The Ugly: - It might be difficult to find the right place to put it in your situation First off, I asked for exactly this product several months ago in a review of another 3R device. I doubt this is a result of my review, product development takes a long time. But dangit, if it isn't still awesome. If you've seen the night light, then you know mostly what to expect. What's different here is that it does NOT come with an adapter for a standard wall outlet like the night light does. This is USB ONLY. Bring your own wall wart. The USB C power plug is on the back, but not recessed like the night light, so you couldn't easily plug this into a wall even with your own wall wart. tl;dr: This is a "set it on a counter/shelf" product. But it is USB, so you can run it off of a battery or a wall wart or any USB charger or even plug it into your computer. I have mine plugged into my laptop dock. I think this could be largely improved by adding a second USB port to the bottom so you could choose which one to plug it into and, for example, plug it in on the bottom and use a Command Strip to mount it to a wall or cabinet, or plug it in on the back and set it on a bookshelf. This new version has actual presence sensing. The high frequency radar does not penetrate walls, so it doesn't sense motion when I'm walking upstairs. It's sensitive enough that it accurately detects me sitting in my office chair not moving for hours hwil I work (or play games). A new feature I absolutely adore is that you can set an automatic brightness and color mode for the led light, so it changes color and brightness based on the time of day. That is perfect for a bathroom or bedroom that you might want brighter, whiter "night light" in during the day but be dimmer at night. I haven't yet checked for a device-specific driver from 3R, so I think it's using the night light driver right now. I'll be doing that and getting photos over the weekend. But I wanted to get this review up ASAP because I've only had this a couple of days and it's already filled in so many gaps in my home automation that regular motion sensors just can't. And it's zigbee, so I don't have to worry about smsrt devices spying on me, and it's 3R so it literally just works right out of the box. I'm definitely buying another one, and will probably get 3 or 4 more as budget permits. [quick update: This should use the ThirdReality Motion Sensor driver from the 3R channel, which is the same driver for both Smart Motion Sensor R1 and Smart Presence Sensor R2. However, I think there's a bug in the zigbee ID because this is using the 3R Zigbee Switch driver, which the night light uses. Hopefully 3R fixes that soon.] Final question, is it worth the price? At the current $50ish price tag, I think it's a bit over-priced. But if you really need that presence sensor (to turn off the lights in the garage when you forgot), and you really want that LED and the other features 3R offers, then this is definitely an upgrade over the cheaper single-purpose off-brand tuya crap you'll spend weeks fighting with to get a community driver to support. But hopefully you can find this one on sale :)

I set it up in Home Assistant using Z2M. Needed to update Z2M to the latest, and there was a firmware update for the R3 (build 40) that took a while to install. Easy enough to setup. Incredibly sensitive. It can detect me through walls if I crank it. The light is a nice touch, and I like that it doesn’t use batteries. The firmware could use some fixing (or at least some documentation). It comes with 4 adjustable sensitivities: motion (0-20), presence detection (0-20), presence sensor (1-6), and hold time (1-4). I did some testing, and having the motion sensitivity >0 basically makes it unusable. It will only detect if you are within 1ft (not sure if there’s some weird interference or something going on inside the device with it active). Presence detection is more sensitive the lower the number, but presence sensor is more sensitive the higher the number (not sure why). Detection at 1 with sensor at 6 it can see through walls and takes about 1 minute to clear. Detection at 5 with sensor at 6 is the sweet spot for me. It can see me standing at the doorway around a corner 15ft away and clear in about 15 seconds if I leave the room. I live in an apartment with concrete walls between neighbors, so I don’t have to worry about false positives. But something to keep in mind. Lux and TVOC work and are nice to have, but I don’t plan to use them so I didn’t test them against a baseline. TVOC is showing 4,100ppb with windows closed and is slowly climbing. Lux is showing 1,100 about 15 feet from north facing window.

Tried this sensor with Hubitat using a community-built driver since no official driver exists yet. Initial performance was promising — mmWave occupancy detection and presence sensing worked well. Illuminance reporting works but is extremely chatty, firing every 1-2 seconds with minor lux changes which could stress a busy Zigbee network. The air quality (TVOC) sensor is the main concern. It reported real values briefly after initial pairing then degraded to zeros and never recovered. Extensive debugging using raw Zigbee frame analysis confirmed the device is transmitting zero on every report — this is not a driver issue. Other Hubitat users have reported identical behavior. The device is listed as "coming soon" on THIRDREALITY's own website suggesting the firmware may not be production ready. THIRDREALITY support was responsive and offered a replacement unit. Given that multiple users across independent drivers are seeing the same TVOC failure I believe this is a systematic firmware issue affecting the initial production batch rather than an isolated defect. Holding off on a replacement until firmware maturity is confirmed by the community. Hardware design seems promising — the TVOC sensor just isn't working yet.

The LED light diffuser on this is amazing, great color range and light distribution. The color controls work great, instant updates via ZHA in Home Assistant. Once presence is detected, presence reporting is reliable with no false clear events. I'm sad to say that's where the great things end. Had no problem adopting in Home Assistant with ZHA, but several of the sensors are not present, like air quality - which was surprising given the whole Thirdreality being known to be almost HA native. Their docs send you to GitHub for quirks that are poorly organized and not for beginners who just want to start using the sensor without installing yet another proprietary app just to tune settings. The quirk for both ZHA and Z2M is named "Multi-Function Smart Presence Sensor R3.py" in the Thirdreality Github repo. It's worth noting that even if you do load the quirk, you cannot update some settings like sensitivity via Home Assistant, as it just throws a failed to write attribute error regardless of level. Firmware was reporting 0x00000011 out of the box and had an OTA update available, but that update kept failing despite a good signal strength in a clean Zigbee network. I had to unplug and move the R3 sensor within 10 feet of my coordinator antenna, a shiny ZBT-2, to even get the device to update so I question if the repeater is going to be super reliable given it couldn't even do updates once it was more than 10 meters away. Updated firmware to 0x0000001b and no real changes in performance except for now the device reports "Unknown" firmware sometimes. As others have said, the presence detection delay is way too slow to be used as an automation trigger on initial presence. It takes at least 5 seconds to report initial presence even if you walk right up to it. You will have to use another PIR sensor or some other mechanism to detect presence if you want to use this to say turn the lights on. Same for clearing presence, where it takes up to 30s sometimes to clear. I tried configuring the transition values but they were not honored, and only seemed to make the triggers take longer. It also has very poor object penetration and must have a very clear view of the room. Otherwise, you get tons of false clear triggers. I've even just been too still sometimes and been put in the dark. Very disappointing for the price. The light (lux) sensor updates quickly, but it uses a very slow ramp-up curve. If the light in the room goes from 60lx to 100lx instantly, like a light turning on, it takes 5 to 10 seconds to slowly watch it update in a smooth ramp-up curve. The updates are frequent but its clearly averaging values before reporting. The VOC sensor for air quality has a trigger threshold range of 3000 to 15000 ppb. The sensor value doesn't seem to update very often, stuck on the same reading despite me doing horrific things to try and trigger an air reading update. I found that it never updated when I had the LED light on and it worked for about 20 minutes after turning the light off and got stuck again. Since then, it works periodically then stops at random. Twice now I've gotten a random screeching alarm with the sensor flashing red that doesn't turn off. The calibrate button throws an error from the device management screen. Unreliable. I was also shocked when unboxing how big this presence sensor actually is - way larger than expected. See the picture of the device beside a coin, USD quarter sized. This device isn't going to be stealthy but at least that makes the light more valuable for those seeking a nightlight effect. A matching white USB-A to USB-C cable included, quite short and typical economy grade cable. TL;DR is buy this presence sensor if you just want an all-in one nightlight and you don't use it to do automations that need fast response times, like turning lights on and off in a room. Software has quite a few bugs still so not really ready for prime time.

Usual high quality from ThirdReality. Setup with zigbee was super simple, HA with ZBT-2 found it instantly. Plus it is powered and work as a zigbee router. I adjusted the distance on the device (shows a color for each distance interval, e.g. blue for 4m), and since then it’s been highly accurate. It has luminance sensor and you can set the light on it to any color or disable. The flat base means it’s not directly meant to be mounted on a wall or in a ceiling corner, but I put it under my TV and that works well for my use case. My first mmWave sensor but already planning on buying more.

So far I've found it to be a good entry point to presence detection. It offers simple controls and limited configurability, but that's not who this device is aimed at. It was easy to set up, and so far has just worked with HomeAssistant. I do wish it was slightly more configurable - namely I wish there was some ability to tap into the accuracy of the sensor to gather information like heart rate sensing. The VoC sensor does not seem to be configurable through HA. They seem to be of varying levels of sensitivity. One got set off today (turned blinking red) because my cat sat under my desk and groomed himself.

Update: I've updated to firmware 23 and it seems to have fixed my problems with the sensor. I have air quality sensors now and the cool down time is really quick now. When I leave the space where it is, it's consistently clearing the presence in less than 10 seconds. I don't know how accurate the air quality sensor but I'm happy with it as a presence sensor with a light now. Which is the main reason why I got it. My old review is still below and I'll just leave it there as is. I'm using this in Home Assistant with ZHA and so far the air quality sensors aren't available yet. I contacted Third Reality about that and they said they're still working on it but it is coming. It's not a good idea to release a product without all the promised features, but I'm willing to overlook that for now since I mainly got it as a presence sensor. But even the presence sensor has issues. It detects and maintains presence just fine. The problem is that it can take a very long time to clear the detection. Even when it's fast, it still takes around 1-2 minutes. But most of the time it takes 3+ minutes. But I've seen it take 10+ minutes several times as well. Admittedly this isn't really affecting me too much but it's still very disappointing. I'm going to keep it anyways because it does a good enough job for where I have it and I'm just going to hope that things improve in a future update. And that's what you have to consider if you're interested in getting it right now.

So far I'm pretty disappointed, especially since my other ThirdReality smart-home devices are among the most stable devices I own in the smart-home arena. I have their motion detectors, door/window sensors, and smart plugs and all work consistently. I was very excited when I saw they came out with a presence sensor. Unfortunately at this point I can't even get it to work. I have it integrated right into my Homey Pro and I can see it listed in my devices. I've created routines to control my smart lighting and so far it's come on once or twice at an odd time and that's it. I do like the flashing light on the top and that it's powered by USB-C and that it's a Zigbee repeater but none of the advertised features matter much if I can't get it to work. I'll continue to troubleshoot but as someone who has over 100 smart devices and tries to stay current with it, if it's this difficult, that's usually not a good sign.