Aqara's FP400 is out: eight zones, Thread, and what Home Assistant sees

Aqara said on September 16 that the Spatial Multi-Sensor FP400 is available worldwide: a mains-powered 60GHz radar sensor that tracks up to ten people, supports up to eight zones, and speaks Thread and Zigbee rather than Wi-Fi. It costs $79.99 in the US and EUR 79,99 in Europe, direct from Aqara and on Amazon in eleven markets. The reason it matters here is the radio. Aqara’s zone sensor has been a Wi-Fi device since the FP2 shipped, and this one joins a Matter network over Thread instead.

Short version: worth buying for whole-room presence, with one catch to plan around before you order. Aqara’s own footnote says that if you pair the FP400 straight into a Matter platform by scanning the code on the device, you get a single whole-area occupancy sensor and no zones. The eight zones have to be drawn in the Aqara Home app first; after that, a Matter pairing code from Aqara Home shares the whole-area sensor plus up to eight zone sensors into Home Assistant. So the sensor is local once it is running, and the setup is not. On Aqara’s own store it is $79.99 against $82.99 for the Aqara FP2, and on Amazon the FP2 undercuts both: it sat at $67.99 for the two weeks before Amazon’s October 6-7 sale and fell to $57.99 during the sale itself. Treat that $57.99 as a sale price rather than today’s. Nothing has read the FP2 since October 8, and Aqara’s other two presence sensors both went back up once the sale ended.

What changed since launch

As of October 14: the CSA certification listing turned up, Aqara forum users have posted working zone setups both with and without a hub, a draft Zigbee2MQTT converter was opened on October 4, and the FP2 dropped to $57.99 on Amazon during the October 6-7 sale, its lowest recorded price, with no reading since October 8. The 10% Amazon launch code ended on September 28.

What Aqara announced

The two units are the same size, 64 x 64 mm and 29.5 mm deep, and mount on a ceiling, a wall or in a corner. Aqara rates the FP400 IPX5 and gives it a wider working range than the FP2, to 50°C. Aqara also names an FP400 Pro for assisted living and elder care; it did not publish that model’s feature list, so I have nothing to say about it.

Two things I couldn’t find on any Aqara page for the standard FP400: a PIR element, and any claim of fall detection, posture or sleep tracking. Some third-party launch coverage mentions posture and fall detection, but Aqara’s own FP400 pages don’t, so I’m not counting on it. If you want a radar sensor with a PIR and a temperature and humidity suite alongside it, that is the FP300, and it runs on batteries.

What stays local, and what doesn’t

Over Thread

This is the interesting path. Aqara says the FP400 can be set up in Thread mode “without an Aqara hub by using an existing third-party Thread Border Router”, and lists Home Assistant among the platforms it works with. Home Assistant’s Matter integration is local push, so once the sensor is commissioned, presence events arrive over your own network with nothing in the cloud path. The FP2’s path is local too, through HomeKit Controller over Wi-Fi, so what changes is the radio rather than the cloud: the FP400 is not another device on your Wi-Fi.

The catch is what gets exposed. Aqara’s footnote is blunt: “Direct setup on a third-party Matter platform over Thread without Aqara Home is strongly discouraged, as FP400 is limited to a single whole-area occupancy sensor with no custom zones.”

The zones

To get more than that, Aqara’s route is to set the sensor up in Aqara Home, draw the zones, set sensitivity and the absence confirmation period, then use “the Matter pairing code generated in Aqara Home” to share it onward. Aqara’s store page says you can then share “one whole-area occupancy sensor and up to eight custom zone occupancy sensors with compatible Matter ecosystems”. Matter allows a device to belong to several controllers at once, which is the mechanism that makes this work.

Aqara’s own pages still disagree on one point that matters for a hub-free house. The press release says a third-party Thread border router is enough and no Aqara hub is needed; the US store page still attaches “via an Aqara Hub” to the eight-zone claim. Since launch, a user guide on Aqara’s forum describes the hub-free route working: add the FP400 to Aqara Home over Thread, draw the zones, generate a second Matter code and pair that into Home Assistant, where each zone shows up as its own occupancy entity that you rename by hand. The guide lists Aqara Home 6.4.1 or later and Thread firmware 1.1.9.6 or later, and notes that if an Aqara hub is already on your account, the sensor goes through the hub instead. That is a user’s write-up rather than an Aqara statement, so if zones are the reason you are buying, check your app and firmware versions first. Aqara lists the Hub M3, M100, M200, the G410 doorbell and the G5 Pro camera hub as the hubs that work today.

Over Zigbee

Zigbee mode needs Aqara hardware. Aqara says “an Aqara hub is essential” to bring a Zigbee-mode FP400 into a third-party Matter platform, and its help article on dual-protocol devices, written around the FP300, says that bridged path lets Home Assistant “only read sensor data and perform basic controls”. One Aqara forum user running the FP400 in Zigbee mode behind a Hub M3 reports that the zones drawn in Aqara Home do come through to Home Assistant over the M3’s Matter bridge.

A direct pairing to Zigbee2MQTT is closer but not there yet. The support request opened on September 17 is still open, and a draft converter pull request opened on October 4 covers occupancy, illuminance, sensitivity and people counting, with zones left for later. It has not shipped in a Zigbee2MQTT release. My FP1E pairs straight to a Zigbee coordinator with no Aqara hardware anywhere, and the FP400 does not do that in a released Zigbee2MQTT today.

Buy, wait or ignore

Home Assistant house. Buy if you want whole-room presence in one more room, and treat the zones as something you configure once in Aqara’s app. If zones are the whole point and you have no Aqara hub, the user reports are encouraging, but Aqara’s store page still mentions a hub, so be ready to return it or add a hub. Either way, you need a Thread border router already working.

Apple or Google Home house. The same limits apply, with the same fix: set it up in Aqara Home, then share it across with the Matter code. Direct pairing gets you one occupancy sensor for the room.

Budget buyer. Ignore for now. The FP1E does single-area Zigbee presence for less, with no hub and no app dependency, and it is the sensor I point people at when the job is “turn the light on while someone is in here”. If you want zones on a budget, check the FP2’s live Amazon price first: it read $67.99 through early October and $57.99 during the October 6-7 sale, both under the FP400’s $79.99, but nothing has read it since October 8.

Does this change my picks?

Not today. Here’s where each stands.

• mmWave roundup. The FP2 stays the zone pick. It has 30 zones to the FP400’s eight, it is still listed and in stock at Aqara, and it is currently cheaper on Amazon. The FP1E and the Everything Presence One keep their places. The FP400 is the better radio and the smaller zone count, and I want more entity lists from people running one before I rank it.
• Room-by-room guide. No change.
• Everything Presence One vs Aqara FP2. Worth revisiting once the FP400’s Home Assistant behaviour is better documented, since a Thread sensor changes that comparison more than a zone count does.
• Catalog. There is no FP400 page here yet, so the product cards on this page are the FP2, the FP1E, the FP300 and the M3 hub, not the new sensor. I’ll add an FP400 entry when I have sourced compatibility facts to put in it rather than a press release.