Motion sensors and occupancy

[iostream212]

I have been getting back into my automation setup and really want to tackle my issues with motion sensors and detecting occupancy.

What I want to happen is to have devices go off if the room is empty, but not go off if I am still in the room being still (watching a movie or doing computer work). Just looking to start a dialog and see if others are doing something similar and how they are doing it. Thanks.

 

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[Michel Kohanim]

Hi iostream212,

 

This should get you started:

http://wiki.universal-devices.com/index ... _Bathrooms

 

In short, all you need is:

If

Control 'Motion Sensor' is switched on

Then

Wait

 

In short, as long as you are in the room and the motion sensor is tripped, the wait restarts.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[marvel]

The above is a quick & easy solution and should work great. I did something a little more complicated.

 

I have a motion sensor in my basement to make sure the kids don't leave the lights on. If you sit still on the couch for too long without moving much, it will time out and turn the lights off when you don't want it to. One way to resolve this is to increase the timeout period, but then you're also leaving lights on longer than you might like when nobody is there. So, here's what I did:

 

I created a scene to fade the lights off over 30 seconds. When the motion sensor sends an off while the lights are on, I set a "BsmtLightsRecover" variable to 1 and trigger my basement lamps fade scene. If the motion sensor switches back on while the BsmtLightsRecover variable is 1, I turn the lights back on (and set the variable back to 0).

 

If I'm in the room, I'll notice the lights slowly getting dimmer, and simply waving my hand returns them to full brightness. I've set the motion sensor timeout just long enough (5 minutes, I think) that this rarely happens, so I'm not constantly waving my hands around to keep the lights on.

 

Originally, I'd just tied the motion sensor's "on" command to the lights, but that made it impossible to enjoy a movie in the dark. So now the lights only come on with motion if they've previously been turned off by lack of motion. Turn them off manually and they stay off.

 

The only thing I haven't figured out how to do is capture the last known dim level of the lights and restore them to that same level. So they always return to full brightness. I can live with that.

[iostream212]

Thanks for the great ideas guys! I am thinking of a hybrid approach of the two suggestions. Part of my issue was placement of the sensor itself. Then updating the programs using the suggestions should really help.