I recently created a custom SmartThings Edge Driver for the Frient Motion Sensor series, which now allows you to adjust the reporting interval for the illuminance sensor — something that wasn’t possible with the stock driver.
This all started when someone on Reddit asked for this exact feature. The issue they described made total sense:
“The illuminance detection only works about once an hour and can’t be configured. That makes it pretty much useless for automations where you want to check the current brightness before turning on a light.”
So… one day later, I built a modified version of the standard SmartThings driver that adds a new preference to control the illuminance reporting interval (max interval).
The problem?
I don’t actually own any of these sensors myself, and the Reddit user who originally asked for the feature has gone completely silent — even though I can see he’s still active there. So right now, I have no idea whether this driver actually works as intended.
If you own one of the following Frient models, I’d really appreciate your help testing it:
If it works, great — I’ll submit the changes the developer of the original driver.
If it doesn’t… well, that’s fine too… I don’t want to spend much more time anyway.
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to give it a spin! Please report back here with any observations — successful pairing, logs, or errors would all be super helpful.
If it reports illuminance when motion is detected and immediately checks the automation to switch on the lights if illuminance is below a threshold, that would be fine, and might actually be the best thing for my use case. If the automation is simply to switch lights on after the illuminance drops below a threshold, it doesn’t help of course. If it detects movement, checks illuminance and then does nothing, it is indeed no real improvement I’m afraid!
I think calling it going silent due to not responding for 24 hours is a bit much! There was no indication in Reddit of a response. I will try this out as soon as I can.
That happens to me in some subreddits, especially Tapo but in others too, I never get the response notifications. If there’s a explicit mention of the username then it notifies.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to have done the trick. I suspect there is something about the driver that means it won’t ever have this basic functionality, hence why I was trying to get contact details for Frient in my original post. I removed all the drivers except this one, removed the device, reset the device and added it back in. I set the illuminance report interval to 10 seconds. That was this morning over breakfast at 07.57. The first illuminance reading was at 08.57 at 37 lux and the next one was at 09.48 at 444 lux. It then reported hourly for illuminance but registered no movement at all, despite me going through the kitchen on at least 5 different occasions, with most if not all of them not being at the times the illuminance was reported.
It doesn’t appear to be reporting anything. It reported the tamper sensor while I was opening and closing the back to reset the device, but now hasn’t reported anything for over 2 hours.
I’ve already ordered a device, and on Monday I’ll be able to take a proper look at it myself - much better than analyzing logs from a distance.
I also suspect that the ability to configure certain settings depends on the firmware version.
In any case, I’m doing this mainly out of curiosity - and because I felt like working with Zigbee sensors again. So I’ll have more detailed information by Monday.
That’s great. I appreciate your curiosity! In the meantime, I have changed back to the Frient driver and it is reporting as before. The illuminance reporting immediately after resetting goes a bit mad, but it normally settles into a one-hour reporting schedule, but motion sensing seems to be working fine. I’’m not that worried about temperature sensing, but that also seems to work. It is just the most important thing for me isn’t, and the reason I bought the Pro over the standard.
I am removing the device, removing the previous driver from the hub, adding the driver I want to use, resetting the device and then adding it back to the hub.
Frient Motion Sensor (AR) – Edge Driver Invite Link
