Zigbee – Ambient Sensing

This is a really awesome development.

Several news stories tie this feature to Phillips Hue lights, or Zigbee lighting generally. I think this is only because that's what has a lot of market penetration. As far as I can tell, ambient sensing would leverage all your Zigbee devices since it's looking at signal interference.

So, when they talk about firmware updates, is this really FW updates to the Zigbee endpoints, or are they just talking about the controller that processes all those LQI numbers?

If it works, this could allow really refined zone occupancy detection depending on how many devices are covering an area. I could see a lot of false positives and limitations to only very course grained detection - large bodies moving through an area. I don't know if a pet moving low to the ground and all would be disrupting zigbee signals enough to be detected.

Anyway, super cool. Anonymous (for subject) and low profile (for instruments) presence/occupancy/motion detection needs all the help it can get.