Has anyone in the US ordered from here? How was the experience? The Aqara is $7.78USD now. The least expensive one on Amazon is $15…
If you’re talking about GearBest, I bought 4 of the “original” and 4 Aqara door/window sensors, when they had them on sale last month, for $7.99 and $5.99 each, respectively. I paid just over $3 for shipping w/insurance.
They shipped the next day, and although were listed as coming from “China warehouse” arrived the following week. I would definitely use GearBest again, and plan to do so after I’m sure my Xiaomi sensors stay connected in my particular setup.
1 Like
If your talking about gearbest, I have ordered from them a lot. All my Xiaomi sensors are from there.
Shipping can be really fast or super slow.
1 Like
Yes I’m talking about GearBest. I’d also like someone to chime in on these vs the ST branded contacts. Seems like this thread has been ongoing for a while. Are you satisfied with reliability and battery life etc.?
Battery life is good.
The Xiaomi sensors can be tricky to get online and stay online, but once you got them they seem great.
They are quick to report, battery life is amazing, build quality awesome, and they are tiny.
Have not used the ST sensors.
I have 15 Xiaomi contact sensors. 1 aqara, 14 originals. I think aqara is a little closer to the zigbee standard.
My single door sensor is still not reporting battery level whereas my motion sensor is - any ideas? It’s been a few days now. Using bspranger DH. Thanks!
Look at the logs for a few hours and see if the parse attribute messages are present. Maybe your device is reporting differently.
Has anyone experienced an issue where the device always says open? Just received my first Xiaomi sensor today, and have managed to pair it and add it, but the device permanently says open. Do I have a broken sensor, or am I making a noob mistake somewhere. I added the device handler, paired, captured the code from the logs and added the device with the code, and selected the correct sensor.
Thanks
Make sure the timezone is set on your smartthings hub.
Thanks for the reply. I assume thats done through the app by selecting a location for the hub using the little map. I actually didn’t have that set, so I have now, but seemingly no difference. Do I need to re-pair? How would that affect the sensor?
Thanks for your time
You have to set it though the online web IDE. I can’t remember exactly where the setting is but I bet that is the problem. After you set it properly the sensors should start working. I don’t think you need to repair it.
I saw this issue before. It was causing a line of code to error out and the sensor was sitting in the open state. This was the fix.
1 Like
can set the motion sensor to search for motion less than 2 minutes?
Thanks, that resolved that issue. Really appreciate it.
Sadly I can’t get the device to pair either at all, or on the rare occasion the process works, to stay paired. This seems about par for the course based on this thread.
I think the real issue comes down to other zigbee devices acting as routers, and 2.4 ghz interference (wifi, baby monitors, Bluetooth, cordless phones, etc).
Once I turned off all other zigbee devices during the pairing, and moved my wifi channels, these devices have been solid.
I am having a hard time to keep the the door sensors stay online thou I got the battery report. Sometimes it shows as offline, sometime it shows either open/close without reporting the door being opened or closed.
I am using the Samsung Connect Home as the hub, so it is next to the WiFi router. And the other device that I have is the Hue lights only. What is your suggestion here? Can’t really move the router away from the hub since the two needs to be connected.
hum, been using original xiaomi sensors over past 6months without issues. so upgraded to aqara sensors. aqara motion sensor workimng fime apart from battery showimg as 0%. using code for original xiaomi sensor. is there an up to date code support for aqara motion sensors?
The Aqara does use a different DH, Go here to get the latest DH https://github.com/bspranger/Xiaomi/tree/master/devicetypes/bspranger
2 Likes
Using the Aqara DH by bspranger for the Temperature sensor. Works as intended, but everytime I manually refresh by hitting the app button, I get this error:
12:54:38 PM: error org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.typehandling.GroovyCastException: Cannot cast object ‘zcl global write 0x500 0x10 0xf0 {null}’ with class ‘java.lang.String’ to class ‘int’
Thoughts?
Also I get a “–” in the first box. I’m assuming that it is the attempt to find out the battery.
Ok I got my Aqara Door/Window sensors today. I got 5 of the 8 hung and paired. 2/5 are reporting battery percentage. Did I miss a step somewhere? I’m using the bspranger DH. Paired by holding the reset button for 3 bright slow flashes, waited then tapped the reset button for 3 dim quick flashes and then paired as normal through the ST app… They seem semi reliable at the moment. I had to play with the magnet placement on some of them to get it to reliably show closed. I had 1 door stop responding and I’ve repaired it. Hopefully they’ll be stable and reliable. 
Any suggestions on what I may be doing wrong with the battery reporting? Also do they report temp like the ST sensors do? I don’t recall.
From what I recall the Refresh button does not work. Yes, the first box is the battery, it will eventually come in usually takes an hour or 2.