Motion not trigger lights

[simplextech]

Here's the setup and I'm sure I'm missing something....

• MS II set to On-Only and Linked to a Dimmer
• Program watches a state variable to then turn off the light after 2 minutes of No motion and the door is Open

This all generally works well with the exception of there are times when I go into the room and the light does NOT come on.  I suspect it's because someone manually turned the light Off when leaving.  However that shouldn't matter???  So is there something I'm missing?

[oberkc]

5 hours ago, simplextech said:

However that shouldn't matter???

No, it should not.

 

5 hours ago, simplextech said:

  So is there something I'm missing

I assume there is a program or scene problem.  If the switch is linked tothe dimmer, I can only assume that one possibility is that the sensor is not seeing you, or not communication with the switch for some reason. Alternatively, Depending on ramp rates and programs, it is conceivable  that a program is turning the switch off immediately after the scene comes on, and it is hard to percieve if there are long ramp rates involoved.  Is your state variable behaving as expected?

I can only speculate without seeing your scenes and programs, however.

[kclenden]

Do you have the LED on the MS II set to come on when it detects motion?  If so, when you go into the room and the light does not come on, does the LED on the MS II light up?  What setting do you have under Options>Motion Condition?  Is it set to "Always"?

[simplextech]

Here's the MS II settings:

 

And here's the Scene:

 

Here's where I capture the "state" into a state variable for the Off program:

Here's the "Off" program

 

It's a very odd thing as everything seems to be working fine most of the time.  But every so often the light does NOT come on.  This is usually right after someone else has left the bathroom and someone then enters within a short period of time.

[kclenden]

"Options>Misc>LED Brightness" is set to 0.  This means that the LED doesn't come on when the MS II senses motion.  If you set it to something non-zero then you'll be able to tell whether the MS II has detected you.  That will at least tell you whether or not the issue is with the MS or your programming.

You say "someone then enters within a short period of time."  Can you be more specific about the length of time?  Based on the "Options>Motion>Timeout" of 10 seconds, if someone left the bathroom and shut the light off, then someone entered the bathroom within 10 seconds, the MS would not turn the light on for them.  If this is what's happening, and you had the LED Brightness set so that you could see whether the MS detected you, the MS LED would not light up.

Edit: One more thing... you don't need the second AND condition in your "OFF" program.  If the bathroom light is already off, and you tell the ISY to turn it off, you're doing no harm.  Of course having the second AND condition probably doesn't hurt anything unless the ISY has the wrong status for the bathroom light.

[simplextech]

30 minutes ago, kclenden said:

"Options>Misc>LED Brightness" is set to 0.  This means that the LED doesn't come on when the MS II senses motion.  If you set it to something non-zero then you'll be able to tell whether the MS II has detected you.  That will at least tell you whether or not the issue is with the MS or your programming.

Even with this the LED flashes green when there's motion and it is visible.  I didn't change that setting from defaults... I may increase it to see.

31 minutes ago, kclenden said:

ou say "someone then enters within a short period of time."  Can you be more specific about the length of time?  Based on the "Options>Motion>Timeout" of 10 seconds, if someone left the bathroom and shut the light off, then someone entered the bathroom within 10 seconds, the MS would not turn the light on for them. 

This may well be the case/issue.  However the 10 seconds is as low as it goes.  This does not happen a lot.  I noticed it today as I went in after my wife when we were getting ready to head out and the light did not come back on so it was less than the 10 seconds....

33 minutes ago, kclenden said:

Edit: One more thing... you don't need the second AND condition in your "OFF" program. 

Maybe habit to add a check/condition to not try and turn something on/off if it is already in that state.  Also the bathroom is a dimmer so if the light was not at 100% (on) but not 0% (off) I wanted to make sure it would turn it off.  I had to do this with Lutron dimmers so it's probably just carry over.

[kclenden]

2 hours ago, simplextech said:

Even with this the LED flashes green when there's motion and it is visible.  I didn't change that setting from defaults... I may increase it to see.

In my experience, the ISY does not read the option values from the MS II, but instead displays the "last known" values.  Which means that when you first install an MS II, the "last known" values are simply whatever the ISY defaults to.  If you never actually set the option value from the ISY, you simply don't know how they are set.  So in your case, while the ISY is showing an LED value of 0, it's probably actually non-zero.  It's one of the reasons on my two MS II, I've used the "Options" dialog to specifically set the values that I want, even if initially it looks like the value is already set the way I want it.  Since yours is already set for the LED to come on, does the light ever NOT turn on after you see the green LED on the MS II?

2 hours ago, simplextech said:

This may well be the case/issue.  However the 10 seconds is as low as it goes.  This does not happen a lot.  I noticed it today as I went in after my wife when we were getting ready to head out and the light did not come back on so it was less than the 10 seconds....

Yeah, I don't understand why 10 seconds is as low as it goes.  I might understand if I was using the MS II on battery (as a power saving measure), but one of mine is powered by USB and 10 seconds is still as low as it goes.

[kclenden]

I used the Event Viewer to see the data that was actually sent to the MS II when the "Timeout" option is set from the Admin Console.  One byte appears to control the value of the setting.  When you choose "Never" that byte is set to 0.  When you choose "10 seconds" that byte is set to 1.  When you choose "2550 seconds" that byte is set to 255.  So the MS II itself seems to impose 10 seconds as the shortest timeout.  Bummer!

[oberkc]

I think the others have covered most of the ground.  For me, the only thing I see that turns on the light is the scene, so I would conclude either that the sensor is, on occasion, not seeing motion, or that there is a communication failure somewhere.  Ramp rates are pretty quick, so I would expect a program failure would be noticeable, with the light coming on for a very short time.

While I don't think this is THE problem, I would follow the advice of kclenden and remove the third condition of the program.  Besides being of little practical use, I am concerned about the timing of things.  Since the variable changing to 1 and the switch coming on happen almost simultaneously in response to motion sensor, I suspect there is some latency in the system.  I consider it possible that the motion sensor "is switched on" and the variable set to 1 could trigger the program before the switch status is registered on.  Besides, if motion is "switched on" and the variable set to 1, you already know that the light is at least supposed to be on.

[larryllix]

If the MS was not successfully factory reset before linking to ISY it may never behave as expected.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

[simplextech]

9 hours ago, kclenden said:

Since yours is already set for the LED to come on, does the light ever NOT turn on after you see the green LED on the MS II?

Yes the LED does indeed flash which is what made me start thinking about this.  I've adjusted things in options just not the LED brightness.

4 hours ago, oberkc said:

While I don't think this is THE problem, I would follow the advice of kclenden and remove the third condition of the program.

I can remove the additional condition.  Now I'm going to play "dumb" here and ask.  With other systems they follow the conditional rules and most "machines" do that if the if/conditionals are all true then it executes the action/then statement and continuously evaluates.  So in my old thinking if the (if + conditionals) all are 'true' then the program would constantly be trying to turn the light off...even though the light is off... or is ISY smart enough to know the light is off so there's no need to run the program without the conditional?  The if is for motion not the light being on so without the conditional the program is always true....

4 hours ago, larryllix said:

If the MS was not successfully factory reset before linking to ISY it may never behave as expected.

This I did not do.  I will dig up a manual online for it unless someone posts a factory reset process before i find it

I'm used to the normal exclude before include of z-wave devices but I'm still "learning" with Insteon devices.

[kclenden]

11 hours ago, simplextech said:

Yes the LED does indeed flash which is what made me start thinking about this.  I've adjusted things in options just not the LED brightness.

In my experience, if the LED flashes, then the MS has sent an ON command.  Since your light is in a scene with the MS, the communication will be directly from the MS to the light.  Here are the possible explanations I can think of that would prevent the light from coming on:

• The ON command from the MS, being RF, wasn't picked up by any dual-band device so wasn't passed on to the switch
• The ON command did get to the switch, but the switch erroneously thought it was already on so didn't take an action
• The ON command did get to the switch, but, as oberkc suggested, something else sent an OFF command so quickly that the light never comes on

Might help if you gather some data by starting the Event Viewer on Level 3 and letting it run until you detect a time that the light doesn't come on even though you saw the LED on the MS.  This would allow you to check whether the ISY saw an ON command from the MS.

11 hours ago, simplextech said:

So in my old thinking if the (if + conditionals) all are 'true' then the program would constantly be trying to turn the light off...even though the light is off... or is ISY smart enough to know the light is off so there's no need to run the program without the conditional?  The if is for motion not the light being on so without the conditional the program is always true....

Without the third conditional, the IF would evaluate as TRUE whether the light was ON or OFF, but that only matters if the program is triggered to evaluate the IF.  The program is only triggered to evaluate the IF in the case that one of the conditionals changes states.  So once the program has triggered the IF with the variable equal to 0 and the door sensor ON, it won't trigger the IF again until either the variable changes to 1 or the door sensor changes to OFF, in which case the IF would evaluate as FALSE.

And that explanation of IF triggering leads to what I think oberkc is referring to as far as timing goes.  Let's say the light is off, and the variable is 0.  Now the MS detects motion and sends an ON command.  Two independent things are happening based on that ON command:

• The ISY detects the ON command and sets the variable equal to 1
• The light detects the ON command and switches itself on and sends a status change to the ISY

The is no guarantee which of those two things happens first, or that both of them even happen.  It could be that the ON command reaches the ISY but not the light switch, or vice versa.  Even if the ON command reaches both, it might reach one when it's first sent, and not reach the other until it has been repeated three times.

So what happens if the ON gets to the light switch but not the ISY?  The light switch turns ON and and sends a status change.  The ISY sees that status change and triggers an evaluation of the IF in your "Off" program.  The variable is still 0, the door is still open, and now the light is on so the ISY sends an OFF command to the light switch.  Would this happen fast enough for you not to see the light come on?  Don't know.  Could this scenario happen if the ON command got to the switch before the ISY?  Seems implausible that the light switch status change would get to the ISY and it would act on it before the ISY had reacted to the late ON command from the MS, but I can't say it couldn't happen.  If you don't include the status of the light switch in the IF of the "OFF" program, neither of these two scenarios matter because the IF won't be evaluated based simply on a status change of the light switch.

[simplextech]

Thanks for the write up.  I've taken both pieces of advice and

• Factory reset the MSII
• Removed the conditional in the program

Now I'll wait and see if this happens again and if it does then I'll know to go to the events at level 3 to monitor and see if I can see anything.  This only happened a few times but it make me wonder if it was something stupid I was doing (which it still may have been).

[toflaherty]

I've noticed with the MSII that even with a timeout setting of 10s and it being configured to send "on only," that what this really seems to mean is that upon detecting motion, an on command will be sent.  This we can all agree to.  AFTER 10 seconds has elapsed with NO MOTION, then another motion detection will send another on command.  Where this is annoying is that if there is CONTINUOUS motion for 10 seconds, or even another motion detection in less than 10 seconds after the first detection, another on command will not be sent.  If you use a program to disable a light, then it will turn the light off after the program timer expires if the motion sensor never experiences a timeout.

[simplextech]

3 hours ago, toflaherty said:

I've noticed with the MSII that even with a timeout setting of 10s and it being configured to send "on only," that what this really seems to mean is that upon detecting motion, an on command will be sent.  This we can all agree to.  AFTER 10 seconds has elapsed with NO MOTION, then another motion detection will send another on command.  Where this is annoying is that if there is CONTINUOUS motion for 10 seconds, or even another motion detection in less than 10 seconds after the first detection, another on command will not be sent.  If you use a program to disable a light, then it will turn the light off after the program timer expires if the motion sensor never experiences a timeout.

I've noticed this as well.  There is no "continuous" detection.  It's once until the timeout expires and then it will detect again.

[oberkc]

20 minutes ago, simplextech said:

I've noticed this as well.  There is no "continuous" detection.  It's once until the timeout expires and then it will detect again.

I guess we are talking about the mode formerly known a "occupancy"?

I guess, for me, I must ask myself how often do I need detection notifications sent?  Certainly, I don't want the motion sensor to send out multiple hits each second.  But, how often must it be to be considered "continuous".   Once per second?  Once every few seconds?  Once every 10 seconds?  

I suspect most people are going to set motion timers for a minute, or a few minutes, or so.  If so, I would think a signal no more often than every ten seconds would work just fine.

[simplextech]

31 minutes ago, oberkc said:

I guess we are talking about the mode formerly known a "occupancy"?

 

I'm new to Insteon so I'm going to have to say... "I guess so?"

This timeout period with z-wave is normal but I have two types of Insteon motion sensors I'm testing with.  I guess the old one and the "new" MSii and noticing the difference in behaviors and learning.

[oberkc]

These are the modes on one of the older sensors.  Interestingly, the shortest timeout period was 0.5 minutes.  The modes "as motion is sensed" was, IIRC, referred to by many as "occupancy" mode.  I do not know how frequently the sensor would send commands in this mode, but suspect each command would be separated by several seconds.

[simplextech]

Yeah I have that configuration for the other 2 older motion sensors I was given.  They still work well.  I used them to replace 2 z-wave sensors and are working just as well.

The parameters/configuration of the insteon sensors and devices is new to me, but overall it's about the same conceptually.

[Hurting2Ride]

If I understand/guess correctly,  you want

• the light to come on any time someone enters the room
• As long as they stay in the room the light should stay on
• If they close the door, the light should stay on
• Once they leave the room, the light should turn off after 2 minutes
• You do not often close this door when noone is in the room

Assuming I have that correct I'd most likely do the following so that there is no fighting between the MS or other control of the light

• Keep the MS directly linked to the light but change the mode to on/off
• Change the timeout to 120 secs
• Have a program that runs when the door status changes.
  • If the door is closed, change the timeout on the MS to 300 (or whatever) secs (If someone stays in the room but doesnt  trigger the MS for 5 minutes, the light will turn off)
  • If the door is open, reset the timeout on the MS to 120 secs
  • The program can also set the state var if you need occupancy information for other purposes but shouldnt require one otherwise