hey everybody it’s LAN Seidman and we’re taking a look today at the wise cents that’s what these little guys are right here these are motion and contact sensors that are used with the Y’s cameras we’ve looked at a few times now here on the channel these cameras are super inexpensive about 25 bucks apiece but are very feature-rich and you can use them without a subscription fee and we did a full review of how these cameras work which I’ll link to down below in the master playlist we’re going to focus today on the new product which are a set of sensors that work with the cameras they’ve got a contact sensor here that can detect when a door is open they also have a motion sensor an infrared motion sensor that can detect when people might be walking around your house and it will generate notifications that you can do things with either through the Y’s app or through IFTTT so we’re going to be taking a closer look at how these work in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that Weis sent these products to the channel free of charge however all the opinions are about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see how these low cost sensors work so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware at the moment they are selling these as a $20 kit you get inside this little box one of these motion sensors two of the contact sensors and a wireless receiver it does though require that you have a camera already and if you don’t have a camera you’ll have to buy one from them this one here costs about twenty five dollars it’s a full-featured Wi-Fi security camera and what you do is take the wireless receiver here and just plug it into the back on the USB port and it’s now ready to go for the little sensors here it also works with the wise cam pan camera that we looked at a few months ago that’s their 360 motion camera the receiver will work with that one as well so you
definitely need to have one of these wise cameras already once you get it installed and update the firmware on the camera through their app it is very easy to get these sensors connected now I took the backs off the sensor so you can see what’s inside there’s large battery here on the motion sensor at the CR 24 50 they say you’ll get about a year of battery life out of these depending on what’s going on if they trigger a lot I think you’ll see lower battery life but you’ll get a warning in the app when it’s time to replace it the other device uses AC r1 6 3 2 it looks like here and again you’ll get a notification when the batteries are running low and you can replace those each of these receivers can connect up to 100 of these little devices and I found the range to be pretty good I was setting this camera up kind of in the center of my house and putting things on different floors and it was working every every room that I tried it in so I was surprised by how good the range was there is no limit though – how many receivers you can get so if you have multiple cameras around the house you can pair up different sensors with different receivers and have them all functioning independently through the app and you’ll get notifications and all the IFTTT stuff mostly centralized so pretty simple to get it up and running there wasn’t much to do other than poke a little button on each device to pair it up and then you are ready to go now the way the contact sensors work is
that you put one portion on the windowsill for example and another one on the window itself so that when the window opens the connection here gets broken between the two sides of the sensor when that happens you’ll see this little orange light start to blink and what it’s doing right now is actually transmitting back to the camera and then it will trigger a notification and I found that these things will stick to just about anything so you’ll see in a few minutes so there’s some other more creative things that you might be able to do with this thing – maybe monitor other things in your house like drawers or cookie jars and that sort of thing the sensors have some adhesive on the back however it is not replaceable adhesive and once you stick it on it will be really hard to get it off so you might want to look at adapting some velcro or something to give yourself some more flexibility for moving these sensors around I do hope that they offer more purchasing options I would love to be able to buy more of the contact sensors on their own I’m guessing they’re just ramping up production right now and hopefully that will be an option in the near future because if you can connect a hundred of these things to your single receiver here there’s a lot of things you can monitor in your home very inexpensively and I hope we see a lot more of these little sensors moving forward so let me hook up
everything here will boot up the app and I will show you how it works all right so here we are in the app and I’ve got my motion sensor and one of my contact sensors paired up with it so I think what I’m gonna do first here is add the second contact sensor to the mix here so you can see I’ve got an option as to what I want to connect to the app here I’m going to select another one of those contact sensors I’m going to be pairing it up with my first camera here and now it just wants me to go over to the sensor and take out this little tool that it comes with and push the button in for three seconds until this little red light here starts blinking and once it does that it will hopefully pair up with the camera and we’ll be good to go takes just a second or two for that to happen it’s usually pretty quick here as you can see now I can give it a name and we’ll call this contact sensor too and then we’ll move over from there I have a little typo in there but we can fix that later I’ll click finish setup and now you can see that my second contact sensor here is on the list and it’s showing me that it is currently closed now you will get pretty much immediate notifications from the contact sensors when they fire off so we’re gonna jump back up to the to up view here I’ve got my phone on its home screen if I just separate the two parts of the contact sensor you can see I was pushed a notification very quickly and if we jump into the wise app here it’ll report to us that the sensor is currently open as of 1207 p.m.
And then if I decide I want to close my door as a simulation here and put the sensor back together you’ll see that it very quickly responds with everything being closed up and by the way this works over the internet so if I wasn’t home I would be getting this information exactly the same way you see here while I am in the home and it also keeps a log of every opening and closing and how long things were open and closed for which can be very useful there are some settings you can adjust so if you don’t want to get notified all the time you can turn off the notifications and maybe only get notified if a door stays open for example now the motion sensor will also trigger some notifications and we’ll do a little test of it real quick I’ve got it pointing in the other direction here and if I wave my hand in front of it we should get a motion detected event here pushed out to my phone and to the app so you can see that working and then you can go in on the notifications here and have it give you notifications when it detects motion or when it becomes clear or both it will have the motion event continue for a little bit before it shuts down but you get the idea as to how all of that works I found the motion sensor here to be very sensitive especially because it has a bit of a fisheye to it so even if you walk on the side of it I’m finding it’s picking things up and sending notifications out so it is very
sensitive it’s probably more sensitive than the cameras motion detection that it uses so you might want to use these in places where you don’t always trust the camera to pick up something or maybe have it in a room where it might be dark it will pick up that motion in the dark and you can trigger a light to turn on and the camera to start recording and you can really nest a lot of different things using IFTTT or some of the built-in features of the app now I want to do something fun now to show you how you can do some automation with this I put the other contact sensor that I got in my kit onto this cookie jar and we’re going to trigger some things to happen when I go in and get my animal crackers here let’s take a look so the first thing we’re going to do is jump back into that cookie jar sensor I’m going to hit the gear icon and go over to sensor videos and what I’m gonna do is have camera one start recording every time that sensor gets triggered and some of the things that you might do with this are maybe you’re in an environment where you’ve got a drawer that has some valuable things in it people are allowed to open the drawer but maybe you want a record of every person that does initiate that open well this will do that for you so if we go in here now you’ll see that camera one is checked off and if we jump back to my to up view here I’ll just back out of the settings here and go
back to the main menu I’m going to open up my cookie jar we will get that notification alerting us that it is now open as you can see here the cameras should hopefully begin recording it does require that the camera be online you can see it’s pushing an image to us here I’m just going to shut the lint back up here because I got caught and we’ll go about our business here that should now show close then if I go over to the camera image that it picked up you can see here that we’ve got a recording now that’s pushing back from the wise cloud of my activity with the cookie jar when it happened and this is something that doesn’t require the cameras motion controls to be on either so this is strictly tied to the sensor and it’s a great way to monitor activities in places where you want to just really have a record of what people are doing when they’re rummaging around through a drawer or opening up a door or something like that very convenient now you can also use if this then that to initiate other activities from those notifications and if we jump over to my phone here real quick you can see what we’re going to do I’ve got one already set up that we’re going to take a look at in a second but I thought I would just show you what the workflow is so once you set up an IFTTT account you attach it to your wise account and you can see now some of the things that I can do I can have it do things of course based on what the camera might have detected but now we’ve got some new options here at the bottom including the contact sensor opening or closing or the motion sensor detecting motion or becoming
clear so for example on the contact sensor if I want to have something happen every time that a open event occurs I can choose the contact sensor that I want to track I can create a trigger here and then I can use just about any other app that’s out there supported by IFTTT to react to that event so I could turn lights on for example I can maybe have an alarm go off I could have a text message get sent to somebody I could even add some things to a Google spreadsheet if I wanted to but what I’ve got running here right now is a little scenario where a light will change color every time the cookie jar is open let’s have a look at that now on the other side of the room I have a Wi-Fi connected smart light bulb that’s compatible with IFTTT and when I open up my cookie jar here it’s going to trigger the alert like it did before with the camera but now IFTTT is getting that alert as well and I set up something to change the light to red that notifies my family that I am getting into the cookie jar again and they need to stop me and then if I return the cookie jar to its original position there you can see the light turns back to blue and this is actually two different events inside of IFTTT you can see the first one here if the jar opens change the color of the bulb and then at the jar closes change the color of the bulb back to something else and then of course I could have it do other things in addition to this just by
setting up additional IFTTT recipes very cool stuff and I like the fact that it works so well with it so you can really decide what products you want it to work with at the moment it does not work with any of the major home hubs I guess they’re working on getting the Amazon a-word along with Google’s home to work with it so that might be coming a little bit later this year but I think IFTTT gives you a lot of flexibility and you can easily tie it in to your existing home automation workflow so overall I am impressed with these little sensors they are very inexpensive they work exceptionally well the range on them is much better than I expected it was working throughout my entire house which is pretty decently sized but again you can always just get another sensor kit and hook them up to another camera in a different part of the house it’s not very expensive to add on to a Y system they are very reasonably priced these are not designed though to work outdoors so you’ll have to put these sensors inside your home not outside the home the cameras are also not weatherproof either so keep that in mind my only real gripe is the fact that they all have permanent adhesive on the back of them especially the little motion sensor here which is something that you might want to move around a little bit so maybe if they had a magnet option or maybe just some stick Andry stick kind of adhesive versus the permanent adhesive they’re using now but I guess it’s a trade-off between something that you know is always going to stick versus something that might fall off
depending on humidity and other conditions so that was my only real gripe with them I would like to see them boost up the app support a little bit to maybe include grouping of sensors together it’s all kind of difficult to arm the system automatically when you leave the house for example so you could maybe have IFTTT do that for you have a location-based event so that when you leave it will turn on the notifications but I would like to see maybe a notification difference depending on what the circumstances are so if I’m home I may not care that the window is open and was left open but if I’m not at home I do care about that so I’d like to see you know maybe some differences in notifications depending on my physical location and that of course is something they can always add through software so overall they are off to a really good start here these are really useful sensors that work is advertised and I remain impressed with this very consumer friendly platform that they’ve put together and you can see more of my reviews with these down below in the video description until next time this is Lyon Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht Kelly Anne Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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