Motion Sensor / Occupancy Help

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  • Last Post 03 February 2015
pilotrose posted this 30 January 2015

Ok I am not exactly sure why, but the light is refusing to turn off. The light turns on when there is motion with the "light on" scene. With the "light off" scene, it is set how you described except that I set the time to 10 minutes for testing purposes.

After 10 minutes and even beyond 20 minutes, the light stays on even though no motion has been detected which is verified by checking android app. The app tells you how long it's been since the motion sensor last detected motion.

The light off scene is set like this:

Device: Light, turn off (0)
Trigger: Motion sensor, no motion detected
Condition: Motion sensor = 0 for 10 minutes

I'm going to mess around with a virtual device and try a similar thing. If anyone has any other ideas please let me know. This should be a fairly simple procedure.

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Robert.Rosal posted this 30 January 2015

Hi Pilotrose,

You may try this.

1) Create new scene "Turn off Lights in 30"
2) Trigger = Motion Sensor turning off
3) Condition = After "Device-Motion Sensor" has been at "0" for "30" minutes

Sorry don't have motion sensor yet to test.

-Robert

pilotrose posted this 30 January 2015

Hey thanks for the help! I'll give that a try and get back to you.

pilotrose posted this 30 January 2015

Ok I am not exactly sure why, but the light is refusing to turn off. The light turns on when there is motion with the "light on" scene. With the "light off" scene, it is set how you described except that I set the time to 10 minutes for testing purposes.

After 10 minutes and even beyond 20 minutes, the light stays on even though no motion has been detected which is verified by checking android app. The app tells you how long it's been since the motion sensor last detected motion.

The light off scene is set like this:

Device: Light, turn off (0)
Trigger: Motion sensor, no motion detected
Condition: Motion sensor = 0 for 10 minutes

I'm going to mess around with a virtual device and try a similar thing. If anyone has any other ideas please let me know. This should be a fairly simple procedure.

lpschreck posted this 30 January 2015

I like to think of it this way:
A trigger is something that starts the scene, and a condition is something that must be true when the scene is started.

So what you have with that is, IF the motion sensor stops detecting motion, check and see if it has reported no motion for at least 10 minutes.

The problem is when it stops reporting that it detected motion it triggers the scene and it doesn't trigger the scene again. Try changing your trigger to a time trigger, repeat it every 1 minutes.

For extra credit use a virtual device to track when the motion sensor turns the light on, and add that as a condition to turn the light off. That way if you manually turn the light on it doesn't automatically turn off every minute.

Hope that helps.

pilotrose posted this 30 January 2015

Thank you for your insight.

So if a light is supposed to turn off every 10 minutes for example, I'll have a simple scene that says:

Since my goal is to keep the light on as long as I am near it, could I do two scenes like this and make it work?


Light on scene:

Device: Light > ON
Trigger: Motion Sensor > Detects motion
Condition: NONE


Light off scene:

Device: Light > OFF
Trigger: Every 10 minutes
Condition: Motion Sensor = 0 (no motion) for 9 minutes.


So every 10 minutes the "light off scene" would try to run, but only if the motion sensor hadn't detected motion for 9 minutes. Thoughts?

lpschreck posted this 30 January 2015

Looks good.

With that it could turn off after 9 minutes or up to about 19 minutes, +/- a few seconds. As long as you are okay with that window.

Example:
Trigger starts at 12:00:00 AM, repeats every 10 minutes.
Motion detector resets and reports no motion at 2:31:01 PM.
Trigger runs at 2:40:00 PM, motion was detected within 9 minutes, doesn't run the scene.
Trigger runs at 2:50:00 PM, triggers scene.
18 minutes 59 seconds.

Motion detector resets and reports no motion at 2:00:59 PM.
Trigger runs at 2:10:00 PM, triggers scene.
9 minutes 1 second

pilotrose posted this 30 January 2015

Ok I've started testing.

Would it be better to keep everything I have the same but change the timer to 1 minute? That way it trys to run the scene every minute but only actually turns off the light if the motion sensor has not detected motion for a certain amount of time?

That'd shorten the +/- window significantly would it not?

lpschreck posted this 30 January 2015

I try and keep the time trigger as high as I can and still have an acceptable window.

But I do use 1 minute for most things.

Just remember without a virtual device, if you turn the lights on manually and the motion sensor doesn't trigger, it will turn the light back off as soon as it runs. Which could be as soon as a few seconds later.

Edit:

Yes, that would do it.

Robert.Rosal posted this 30 January 2015

This is great, once I get my motion sensors, I'll know what to do.

lpschreck posted this 30 January 2015

Here is how I did it. Hope it helps.

Light on scene:

Device: Light - ON
Device: VD-Motion-Tracker - ON
Trigger: Motion Sensor - Detects motion
Condition: NONE


Light off scene:

Device: Light - OFF
Device: VD-Motion-Tracker - OFF
Trigger: Every 1 minutes
Condition: Motion Sensor = 0 (no motion) for 10 minutes
Condition: VD-Motion-Tracker > 0

mike@cqsteel.com.au posted this 03 February 2015

I'm new to this game, but I have already come across an interesting capability.
My device "light switch" can be turned on or off, but at the bottom of the device window on the UI is a tick box you can check that says "Turn the light back off automatically after X seconds"
I have tested this with 10, 20, and 30 seconds and it's a nice feature.
Not sure if it is capable of 1800 seconds, but if it were, you would only need the motion "ON" to trigger the light ON scene. No scene to turn off, and no conditions on the other scene.

OR would this create a flicker of the light once every 30 minutes whilst you were walking around in the room??
Not for sure, but might be worth a try.

Since the reset time on the sensor is set at 4 minutes, it should be continuing to send "ON" signals to keep the scene going whilst you are moving around in the room.

Let us know how you go.

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