So some time ago something happened to the Wireless Weather Sensors app resulting in me having to delete all my old sensor devices and re adding them to my Homey. During this (tedious) process I noticed that the app found several sensors that are not mine. I have experienced this before, but never this many. We are talking 10+ devices that are not mine. For information I live in a house and know most of my neighbors and know that none of them are into home automation. Sure, some may have a 433 MHz sensor or two, but no one have a multitude of them.
The weird thing is that many of the “ghost” sensors I see when searching for new devices have really strange readings:
As you can see eight of them show really low temperatures, far below freezing. It’s like one of my neighbors have bought a bunch of freezers and put sensors in them. (It’s a really warm summer here in Sweden right now.)
I have two freezers with sensors but none of them are the ones showing in the picture.
As I said this phenomenon started after the crash of the Wireless Weather Sensors app and when I had to delete all the sensor devices and adding them again. I find it very unlikely that one of my neighbors bought eight new freezers exactly the same time as I experienced the app crash.
A common source for 433Mhz signals are TPMS (Tyre Pressure Monitoring System) sensors that modern cars use. Perhaps the app is mistaking those signals for coming from a particular weather sensor.
However, I do know that there are not that many cars (if any) with that feature in the reach of my Homey. I live in a suburb with small houses and with no commercial businesses around.
The 433 MHz protocol is weird…but I really prefer it for sensors (and lighting) for several reasons.
Well, it’s still weird that after the app crashed all these sensors turned up…and they had never been there before. Maybe one of my neighbors bought ten cars the same day.
When was the last time the ghost sensor values were updated?
I don’t know the WWS app and I’m not familiar with 433 MHz devices, but maybe it makes sense to delete the app and reinstall it?
That’s the weirdest thing about this…the ghost sensors updates regularly. Before the app crash (or maybe it was an update…don’t really know) I got ghost sensors now and then when I added my own sensors…but those didn’t update much. Some just never updated and some updated very sporadically…indicating it was “true” sensors just in reach of my Homey.
The ones I have now updates like it was sensors I have in my house, well maybe a little less often. If the temperature readings were “normal”, say around 20°C, I would just write them off as sensors from my neighbors…but since most of them are freezer temperature it feels really suss.
OK Robert…I hear you…but that theory doesn’t explain why all those sensors suddenly turned up from one day to the other or why it happened in conjunction with the app hassle. Also, those TPMS things, do they have two sensors each? One that would trick Homey that it’s a temperature sensor and one that it’s a humidity sensor?
You only get to see these devices when you want to add a new device to Homey, and you explained that because of app hassles, you had to add all your devices again. So it’s not that these sensors “suddenly turned up”, they just showed up in the list of devices the app found while you were adding your own devices again.
Possibly. TPMS sensors typically provide at least 3 sensor values: tyre pressure, temperature, battery level (but often other values too).
I know that Robert but I was doing a lot of work with my system at the time so I know that the ghost sensors turned up suddenly and were not there before. But maybe my neighbor bought two cars and one motorbike with those sensors one day giving me ten ghost sensors. Strange that I haven’t seen the cars or bike though…
I see now that I need to read up on those sensors. Not that I will ever would want to have them on my cars…that would flood my Homey with useless sensors each time I want to add another one.
It’s a “feature” that was introduced when the app was updated to support new Homey libraries, all sensors using alecto v3 protocol will show up twice, just select the one with accurate reading.
Don’t ask me for a better explanation than that, I don’t have that kind of understanding, but you can find some discussion about it in the dedicated thread for the app, I suggest you ask there if you want a clarification. https://community.homey.app/t/app-pro-wireless-weather-sensors-reads-data-from-several-brands-of-wireless-weather-sensors/23532
I’ll continue my questioning in that thread. 