Recently i installed a smart sense motion sensor powered by the USB port and i want one of my presence sensors to have this motion sensor as a parent instead of the smartthings hub.
I have already done the procedure of turning the hub off for 15 minutes for the presence sensor to re-parent with the powered motion sensor but i have my doubts that it really did so.
Is there a way to know for sure which is the parent of my presence sensor?
SmartThings does not provide routing utilities. If it’s really important to you and you’re willing to spend extra money, you can buy a 3rd party mapper. See the following FAQ.
You could also write support and see if they can they can check for you.
Luis, can you give us a little more details on what your wanting to do here. A parent child relationship between to ZigBee devices is not the same as a bind between those two devices. Why do you care who the parent is of your presence sensor?
sure
What happens is that i have a presence sensor on my car that i use to open the garage door when i get back home.
Since the Hub is inside my house i am having false “departures” of my car during the day that open the garage door when the communication with the presence sensor and the hub is lost.
What i did to solve this situation was to buy a smart sense motion detector which i have powered from the USB source in my garage so that the link is stronger between the presence sensor and the motion sensor which is now acting as a repeater.
Anyway i have noticed that i still have the false “departures”. I am thinking that what is happening is that when i leave with the car, the presence sensor obviously looses contact with the smart sense motion sensor and when i get back home, perhaps the first device it detects is the hub and it remains connected to it as a parent when i leave the car at the garage.
I wanted to prove this hypotesis by somehow peeking on the parent device that my presence sensor has
Are you sure the motion sensor acts as a repeater? Not all devices do.
Maybe try a plug in module in the garage and see if that helps.
The first generation SmartThings motion sensor (now discontinued) when USB-powered, does act as a zigbee repeater. Many people use it for this purpose.
The second and third generations do not.
Well that makes sense…@lcantu, what generation is your sensor? Just trying to cover all of the bases.
Also, the presence sensor (in the garage) losses comms. The motion sensor (in the garage) losses comms.
Try placing the motion sensor just outside of the garage, between the hub and the car.
The usual advice is to put the motion sensor inside the garage to improve the mesh in that specific location.
The garage is probably the most difficult room in the house as far as getting signal from one side to the other. There’s typically a lot of concrete, a lot of metal, sometimes water pipes, maybe even tinted glass. And, of course, cars. Once you get the signal across that room to the door, you’re usually fine again. But getting across that 20 feet can be killer.
So typically people put a motion sensor either right up against the street-facing wall or window to try to extend signal out to the street for a presence sensor coming home, or, midway in the garage just to get the signal across the room.
But it’s all trial and error. 
“All home automation is local.”
As far as the OPs original question, whichever device is detected first, sensor or the hub, will be the one with the strongest signal, so it should be fine for that particular routing.
Unless you think you’re picking up the hub from a street-facing window and then losing the network when you pull the car into the garage. Which can happen. But if it happens it happens, you can’t change it except by doing something to interfere with the hub’s broadcast to the street.
And if it does lose connection to the hub in that case, it should then pick up connection to the motion sensor in the garage again for the next routing . Unless your issue is that you are triggering arrival events for a second time. In that case, you can increase the bounce delay a bit and that should solve it for most people.
Your best bet may be to put the hub closer to the garage. I have often wondered if SmartThings has tweaked the hub to be more tolerant of a sleeping device’s check in peirod. A standard ZigBee router is going to assume the sleeping device has left the network or moved to another parent if the child doesn’t check in often.
Presence sensors specifically are handled differently by SmartThings, including a parameter for how many check ins they’re allowed to miss before they’re marked as away.
Ahh yea that makes sense, and I bet its a tweak to hub’s ZigBee radio. I wonder if anyone has had success using one of their ZigBee presence sensors as child to a standard ZigBee router. I bet the sensors always re-home to the hub if they can see it at all.
2 things … get smartthings zigbee switch in the garage. I have it in two houses and get great performabxe with the sensors.
Second take a look at my modified presence sensor device type if you are getting returns without leaving.
Dont understand why it wasn’t written correctly to avoid this in the first place but I am using my device type and it filters out and ignores state changes if you already are in that state.