Connect Your 60GHz mmWave Radar to Home Assistant (Verified Walkthrough)

If you bought one of our 60GHz mmWave radars — fall detection, presence, or sleep monitoring — and configured it for MQTT, the next natural step is to get that data into a dashboard you can actually see. Home Assistant (HA) is the obvious choice: it speaks MQTT natively, runs locally (your data never leaves your home), and is free and open source.

This guide is different from most tutorials. Every step below was run on a real Windows 11 machine with WSL2 and Home Assistant Core 2025.1.4, against a live radar talking to an Apache Artemis broker. No "should work in theory" — it is verified.

The big picture

60GHz Radar  --MQTT-->  Broker (Artemis / Mosquitto)  --MQTT-->  Home Assistant

Three actors:

• The radar publishes JSON over MQTT on two topics.
• The broker (Artemis in our setup, Mosquitto works too) is the middleman. The radar does not talk to HA directly — it talks to the broker.
• Home Assistant subscribes to the broker and turns the JSON into entities you can see and act on.

If you have not set up the broker + radar MQTT side yet, do that first (see our MQTT architecture article and the product setup guide). This article starts from "I already have a working broker and my radar is publishing data."

Before you start

You need:

1. A broker reachable on your network (e.g. 192.168.1.2:1883) with a username and password.
2. Your radar configured for MQTT (broker IP, port 1883, credentials) — covered in the setup guide.
3. The device's DeviceID. Good news: on our radars the DeviceID is the device MAC address, which is also the MQTT ClientID, and it is printed on the back of the device. No manual registration needed.

The topics look like this (replace {DeviceID} with the number on the device back):

• Report (radar → you): /Radar60FL/{DeviceID}/sys/property/post
• Command (you → radar): /Radar60FL/{DeviceID}/sys/property/set

Radar60FL is the prefix for the 60GHz fall radar. Sleep = Radar60SP, presence = RadarHP, and so on.

What is Home Assistant, briefly

HA is an open-source home automation hub. You run it on a box at home (Raspberry Pi, mini-PC, or even a Windows laptop via WSL2). It pulls data from hundreds of device types and shows everything in one dashboard. Because it is local-first, nothing is sent to the cloud.

Three ways to install it:

• HA OS — a dedicated image for Raspberry Pi / x86 mini-PCs. Easiest for pure users.
• Docker — one container, but you need to be comfortable with Docker.
• HA Core — run the Python app directly. This is what we verified, and it is the lightest path on Windows with no Docker. This guide uses HA Core on WSL2.

Install HA Core on WSL2 (verified)

WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) lets you run a real Linux on Windows — and HA Core is happiest on Linux.

If WSL2 is not enabled yet, in an administrator PowerShell:

wsl --install

Reboot when prompted. Ubuntu will set itself up and ask you for a Linux username and password.

Then, inside the Ubuntu terminal:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y python3-venv python3-dev build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config

python3 -m venv ~/hassenv
source ~/hassenv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install homeassistant

The last step downloads a lot of packages — give it a few minutes. When it finishes, start HA:

hass

First launch initializes the config and database and takes several minutes. You'll know it is up when port 8123 responds. Open http://localhost:8123 in your Windows browser and create your admin account.

We tested on Ubuntu 24.04 with Python 3.12 and Home Assistant Core 2025.1.4. HA requires Python 3.12+, so use a current Ubuntu.

To keep HA running after you close the terminal, start it detached:

setsid nohup hass > ~/hass.log 2>&1 < /dev/null &

Connect Home Assistant to your broker

1. Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration, search MQTT.
2. Enter your broker details:
   • Broker: 192.168.1.2 (your broker's IP)
   • Port: 1883
   • Username / Password: your broker credentials
3. Save.

You can confirm the link from the broker side: Artemis' console will now show a new connection from Home Assistant.

Configure the radar sensors (the important part)

Out of the box, HA does not know what fallStatus means. We declare sensors in configuration.yaml (in your HA config folder, ~/.homeassistant/configuration.yaml on Linux).

mqtt:
  sensor:
    - name: "Bathroom Fall Status"
      unique_id: "radar60fl_fallstatus"
      state_topic: "/Radar60FL/{DeviceID}/sys/property/post"
      value_template: >
        {% if value_json.params.fallStatus is defined %}
          {{ value_json.params.fallStatus }}
        {% else %}
          {{ this.state }}
        {% endif %}

    - name: "Bathroom Presence"
      unique_id: "radar60fl_presence"
      state_topic: "/Radar60FL/{DeviceID}/sys/property/post"
      value_template: >
        {% if value_json.params.someoneExists is defined %}
          {{ value_json.params.someoneExists }}
        {% else %}
          {{ this.state }}
        {% endif %}

Replace {DeviceID} with the number printed on your device.

Why the if defined … else this.state pattern is mandatory here. The radar does not send every field in every message. Sometimes it publishes {"params":{"someoneExists":"1"}}, sometimes {"params":{"fallStatus":"1"}}, and often just a couple of fields. If you wrote {{ value_json.params.fallStatus }} directly, every message that lacks fallStatus would blank the sensor out. The template above keeps the last known value when the field is absent — this is the standard, stable way to handle sparse MQTT payloads.

After editing, reload without a full restart:

• Developer Tools → YAML → MQTT: Reload (or call the mqtt.reload service).

See your radar data in the UI

Four ways, fastest first:

1. Developer Tools → States. Type bathroom in the entity filter. You'll see sensor.bathroom_fall_status and sensor.bathroom_presence with live values and last-updated time. Walk in front of the radar and watch presence flip.
2. The default Overview dashboard. New sensor entities auto-appear as cards. You should see "Bathroom Fall Status" and "Bathroom Presence" on the home screen.
3. Raw MQTT. Settings → Devices & Services → MQTT → Configure → Listen to a topic → enter /Radar60FL/{DeviceID}/# → Start Listening. You'll see the raw JSON stream — great for discovering every field your model reports.
4. A history graph. Edit the Overview dashboard, add a History card on sensor.bathroom_presence, and you get a "who-was-here" square-wave over the day — great for demos.

Pitfalls we actually hit (so you don't have to)

• Don't use the web UI "Restart Home Assistant" button when running HA Core from the command line. There is no supervisor to bring it back, so it stops and stays stopped. Use the setsid nohup hass … & command above instead. (We learned this the hard way.)
• Two harmless log errors on WSL2: aiodns … getaddrinfo() and libpcap is not available. Both are environment quirks (DNS resolver / DHCP discovery) and do not affect the web UI or MQTT. Ignore them.
• fall_status shows unknown at first — that is normal. fallStatus is only reported on a fall event, not continuously. Query it once with a get command: publish {"version":"1.0","method":"get","params":{"fallStatus":""}} to the /set topic, and it fills in with 0.
• HA will not auto-start after a PC reboot. Re-run the setsid nohup hass … & command. For a permanent setup, HA OS or Docker (with restart policies) is the better long-term home.

Wrapping up

That is the whole chain, verified end to end: radar → broker → Home Assistant → dashboard, with real values flowing. From here you can build dashboards, alert on falls, or trigger other smart-home devices — all locally.

For the broker + radar MQTT setup and the full list of reportable fields per model, see our MQTT architecture article and the product setup guide on the docs site.