QingPing HomeKit Motion and Light Sensor Filing Revealed [U]
We’ve featured a few QingPing products on our website in the past, like the Temperature & Humidity sensor with an E-Ink display, as well as the more recent QingPing Air Monitor Lite, which features a host of sensors along with an OLED display. Now it would seem the company are preparing for the release of a new combined motion and ambient light sensor to add to their lineup of HomeKit compatible devices.
A listing on FCC.io has revealed the existence of the product, although we were unofficially informed that this was coming anyway. In fact, this product already exists in non-HomeKit form, although the particular model in question only works with Xiaomi’s Mi Home ecosystem.
As the title suggests, this is both a motion sensor and an ambient light sensor, with both sensors confirmed as exposed to HomeKit.
the sensor uses a magnetic ball joint to mount it to a wall, with the joint part sticking to the wall with an included adhesive patch. This arrangement allows the angle of the sensor to be easily adjusted to the appropriate angle, or removed to change the batteries, which, like the recently released Aqara P1, uses two CR2450 coin batteries.
The current non-HomeKit model uses Bluetooth, which brings us to another point. At this stage, the only mention of connectivity in the user manual states that the HomeKit version also uses Bluetooth, but we’ve been informed by QingPing that they’ve been preparing Thread versions of many of their products, with this being one of the first.
Whilst the FCC listing doesn’t mention the details of the particular chip used, Qingping confirmation that this device will use Thread means this is indeed a Thread capable chip, as we’ve seen in the past with the Wemo Stage Scene Controller. We have been unofficially informed that the chip used is the Nordic nRF52840, which is indeed capable of being updated to use Thread. The wemo wireless switch was billed as ‘Thread Ready’ when it was first released, but it took a further ten months for the company to issue the required firmware update to enable Thread functionality. This could be the case with the QingPing offering.
To compound what we already know, whilst the company have in the past released the HomeKit version of the aforementioned temperature sensor with the letter H as a suffix to distinguish it from the Mi Home version (using the M suffix), this particular sensor uses….yes, you guessed it, the letter ‘T’ – which must stand for ‘Thread’ of course.
Hopefully, we’ll be seeing this and many other sensors from the likes of Onvis and Aqara when they start releasing their Thread-enabled devices.
