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Review on ONVIS Hygrometer Thermometer Temperature Bluetooth by Prettyboy Capers

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Hardware good, manufacturer application bad

With Onvis you get a motion sensor, temperature sensor and humidity sensor. This helps reduce the number of individual sensors you need to purchase if you need these features. This is the only Homekit device I've seen that uses Bluetooth 5.0. Having just received it, I can't yet say how long the batteries will last when the automation is running. This device is powered by 2 AAA batteries. The battery compartment is very difficult to open. The problem with the battery compartment is the cover. First, there aren't enough grooves to comfortably open the battery cover. Then they stuck a sticker right in the middle of the lid. This glue is there so you can stick Onvis to the wall if you want. But with this design, there's little room for a good grip to open the lid. I had to use the end of a pair of scissors to pry the lid open. The hardware for this Homekit motion sensor is good. The response time of the motion sensor is fast. Once the device recognizes you, any Homekit trigger you create will fire quickly. However, it seems to have a hard-coded timeout of 12 seconds. This means that as soon as no more movement is detected, the Homekit No Motion Event is triggered after 12 seconds. In contrast to the motion sensor Elgato Eve, the timeout for ONVIS is not configurable. As such, you cannot set your own hardware timeouts like you can with the Elgato Eve Motion product. You must use the Homekit software based undo feature to get a custom timeout. Ovis then keeps a log of all movement events. The Elgato Eve motion sensor does the same. But the Eve product shows both motion and no motion with well-formatted graphics. There are no diagrams in Onvis. It simply displays the time while the movement is taking place virtually on the screen. Also, this text log takes a lot longer to display than I thought because the Elgato Eve product displays the data faster. The Onvis application is poorly written. There are many spelling mistakes. The "Documentation Help" and "About Us" sections are written in Chinese. The Onvis app has different screens for scenes and devices, but doesn't categorize them by room. Since there are much better Homekit apps out there, you don't need to use the Onvis app for anything other than firmware updates. It would be great if they could add the ability to set motion timeouts like the Elgato Eve app does. Finally, it would be more convenient if the device had a light sensor like the Hue motion sensor. The humidity sensor is great, but the light sensor works in conjunction with a motion sensor rather than a humidity sensor. So, currently I would give the Onvis app a 1 and the hardware a 4 on the scale. 5. As the device has multiple sensors, I am now giving it an overall score of 4. Update - January 26, 2019 The app and firmware were updated a few days ago. Now the app looks very good and works very well. Additionally, similar to Eve Motion, the firmware update allows the user to select a specific timeout for the motion sensor. So based on this upgrade, this motion sensor is on par with Eve Motion in terms of speed and basic functionality. ONVIS's lower price makes it much more attractive than buying Eve Motion. I've updated my rating to 5 stars due to the updated functionality, but the battery compartment is still difficult to open and needs a redesign. The battery life is still unknown as the product is new. Update 02/18/2019 I found that, unlike Eve Motion, the sensitivity of this motion sensor cannot be changed. So if you place this sensor in a place where the sun casts a shadow in your room, the motion sensor can detect that as movement. Without the ability to change the sensitivity, it will be difficult to solve this type of problem. So I'm reducing my rating to 4 stars.

Pros
  • Few competitors
Cons
  • unreliable