Firstly I’m going to check out the NOUS Door/Window Sensor E3
Immediately a nice-looking device – runs on Zigbee and I have of course used Zigbee2MQTT though NOUS no doubt have their own Zigbee hub. I’ve found Zigbee2MQTT running in Home Assistant to be very reliable – so that’s my starting point.
I opened the very colourful box to find the NOUS Sensor E3 device, magnet unit for the door or doorframe – and the realisation that this device uses another battery I’ve never used…. a CR2 – BUT they CLAIM up to 5 years life. Good start. I noted a small RESET button on the bottom of the device (and a blue LED visible from the front) – so no tools needed – anyway I could not resist having a look at the battery and the unit comes apart by hand only – no need for even a screwdriver. I took off the protective shipping tab attached to the battery and held the reset button in for 10 seconds after which I added the device to my Zigbee network – it joined quickly with another of those utterly unreadable long numbers which I quickly replaced with the name nous-door-e3-1 (my choice). The device exposes open/closed status, battery percentage and voltage. Simple enough. If the battery life is anywhere near what they claim – happy – if not – look back in here in X years time
And here is the device in Zigbee2MQTT on my Windows PC in Chrome (Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant are operating on a small mini-pc).
Finally the information the device exposes…
Now the Nous Water Leakage Sensor E4
This Zigbee2MQTT device nearly caught me out as I could not find a reset button to pair the Sensor E4 with Zigbee2MQTT – not until I realised what appeared to be just a logo on the front was actually a touch-area which responded to a little pressure.
On closing and pressing that “button” area while having Zigbee2MQTT set to accept new devices, the E4 sensor immediately paired with Zigbee2MQTT to expose the following:
I believe this is the smallest, neatest leakage sensor I’ve come across to date. I’m not sure about the battery life claim of 3 years but time will tell. Sonoff’s SNZB-05P comes in second for size but is not quite as easy for battery change – the Sonoff uses the more expensive CR2477 battery.
Nous B3T 2-Channel Smart Switch/Curtain Module B3T
The B3T Module looks remarkably like one of the Shelly products but is of course driven by Tasmota. While I don’t pretend to understand the logic of only one neutral connection, the device is logically laid out and like all of their other Tasmota-based products there is a great manual available online which even reminds you, quite fairly that the Tasmota firmware is not a commercial product. Don’t let that put you off. Tasmota also doesn’t encourage you to use a cloud in some far off distant land – and in my experience is extremely reliable.
So, one neutral, 2 lives (110v-240v) or DC (24-30v). As I don’t have a low voltage motor handy I’ve just plugged the B3T into 240v AC. You see that green light above left? It’s flashing to let you know that the unit is ready to be set up.
At this point it will have the usual Tasmota built-in access point available so I’ll send my phone off to look for it, then having selected it, will point the phone browser to 192.168.4.1 – nothing new here if you’ve been following me on the other Nous Tasmota devices. Sure enough – access point tasmota-xxxx-xxx appeared.
Off to 192.168.4.1 and select my nearest SSID. The B3T switches to that access point and my phone goes back to a normal access point and opens the main Tasmota page. Some text alignment issues there but I’m sure that’s out of Nous’s hands.
Once again we have temperature shown. But compare to the A8T, the latter says “ESP32 Temperature”, the former says “Temperature” – I’ve been wondering why the wording is different. As for the usefulness or otherwise of showing the internal chip temperature – how to turn that display off and how to switch between Celcius and Fahrenheit – take a look here… “sfromis” has always given me good advice. Sfromis promptly came back to me today to say that the “ESP Temperature” reading is not accurate (as I suspected) but the plain “Temperature” reading is likely for an added sensor device – I can only assume NOUS have put a sensor in the unit and not (yet) documented it – OR the power-monitoring chip has a temperature sensor in it – in which case – more info would have been useful. It LOOKS like the power monitoring chip has a temperature sensor but without knowing what any safe limits are, it’s hard to say how useful this sensor is.
The B3T will, as it says, drive a maximum 16A load on each channel but as always I suggest leaving a healthy margin and that is 16A resistive, not inductive load. On low voltage the device can handle a lower current. All of this is documented in the NOUS online manual.
For now I intend to set up the device name – I think B3T-1 will do – and upgrade the firmware to the latest Tasmota as I did on previous Tasmota devices.
Note – the image on the left is from the A8T for comparison – the image above right is the B3T with it’s twin outputs.
Ok, all done – and I checked that the relays click properly. I should say that the webUI is generally considered to be a developers tool (though I use it sometimes when playing with boards). Let’s go see if Home Assistant has picked up on this device (most likely as I set up MQTT in the configuration section).
I just have to look for B3T-1 in Home Assistant (note I’m doing this a while after setting up as I went to make coffee).
Sure enough, as if by magic, a quick SEARCH of devices in settings – devices yields the following:
and digging into that… I called friendly name 1 and 2 in the webUI b3t-1-1 and b3t-1-2 respectively… (note – I had to reboot Home Assistant to get the correct friendly name to show under controls – I probably could just have waited a while longer)
You looking at the above? AS I turned on and off the two outputs in HA, both CONTROLS and the log book provided the correct names.
See below, all the sensor entities for the B3T device I just set up… anyway the device works. More later.
And there it is – in the sensors – “Energy BL09xx Temperature” 52. So that’ll be 52c off-load – at some point I’ll put something near the limit for load on this device and see what the temperature is. As Tasmota RULES have not been used on this device (as far as I can tell), then adding a rule to turn the power off if the chip temperature is above X would be good. It’s just a case of finding out what X should be.
And now the A6T and A6Z 3680W Water Resistant outdoors Smart Plugs
It looks to me like these two smart plugs, rated at 16A – are the same aside from the firmware. The former uses Tasmota, the latter uses Zigbee.
For Tasmota users – the Nous A6T, for Zigbee users – the Nous A6Z. Of course the latter can use a hub – or if you are already using Zigbee2MQTT then it will work with that.
I like the seals – solid-looking. On powering up the A6T – the only visible light is the green flashing “button” on the side – to be expected as the device will like others have created it’s own access point to start the ball rolling. Sure enough – tasmota-xxxxx-yyyy
As you’d expect if you’ve followed this 2-part article up to now – at 192.168.4.1 – the Tasmota webUI. I tell it about my nearest 2.4Ghz WiFi – and it connects to that at a DHCP-assigned address – 192.168.1.123 in this case.
Interesting – THIS device shows power monitoring – and it is using an ESP32 with 4MB of FLASH – ie the maximum you will normally come across. and yet, no sign of any temperature sensor.
Parameters as with previous Tasmota devices – firmware update – because I can – from v14 to v15. The button light turns green when press ON or turned on from the webUI, nothing when OFF.
Why no temperature sensing this time? Different sensor chips. Goodness knows why. Other than that, the device webUI is exactly as it should be.
Setup and operation fo the A6T is pretty straightforward if you’ve looked at the other power monitoring devices in this pair of blog entries – so no point in going over the same ground again.
And once again I’ll have the device running in Home Assistant in no time together with all the available entities.
As for the A6Z – at first glance it looks like this has already been paired to some Zigbee coordinator at the factory when testing – as the green button light is on solidly.
Once you’ve done one Zigbee device setup this all becomes very obvious – and I’m pleased to say that none of the Nous Zigbee devices insist on using some proprietary hub – and that at the time of writing, Zigbee2MQTT supports everything I’ve looked at here.
So off I go to Zigbee2MQTT looking for new devices.. well, I was right – nothing. So I hold in the button for 10 seconds and on release, the light starts flashing and…
A quick rename and..
I’d never really thought about this before but it really IS easier to set up Zigbee devices as against Tasmota – but remember – the Zigbee device are reliant on a hub or Zigbee2mqtt on some kind of Raspberry Pi or mini PC or whatever – whereas the Tasmota devices are completely stand-alone – well, apart from needing WiFi. Of course – a WiFi device will only work within the working area of the access point you assign to it, whereas Zigbee can be massively expanded – as you start to run out of range – another mains-powered Zigbee device – just by being powered up (not ON or OFF) – including Zigbee bulbs – can automatically act as a “repeater” or “router” as they call it.
The A6Z exposes on/off, power monitoring, a countdown, power outage memory (i.e. what state the device should be in after a power outage), indicator, oh – and a child lock – not all such devices have this. Handy for stopping the kids pressing buttons. bear in mind when choosing however that Tasmota is VERY much more powerful when it comes to stand-alone timers, rules and umpteen options for the more advanced user, all of which can be ignored by beginners. If you aer using something like Home Assistant, you can make up for Zigbee’s lack of options by making control rules in Home Assistant itself, of course.
