I have also seen where it can be used for people motion detection. What I am thinking is for outdoor use where heat signatures changes where as this would not be affected. The range may be an issue. I have also seen where people have made complete radars for these. I am just not sure how it is programmed and if you can use it like I see one picture and someone moved so you figure at what speed and assume that it is a car, body, or a goat that came up on your property
Apologies if a question like this has already been answered. (please point me to it)
Iām trying to control an older lighting system over RS-232 with simple ASCII commands.
Iāve got a Lightolier lighting system with a Brilliance II control panel in the basement. The panel will accept (and reply with) simple ASCII commands over RS-232. I have the protocol documentation, and I can control the lights using an old windows XP machine via RS-232 and Lightoliers ādemoā program.
I would very much like to make the system controllable with SmartThings and ultimately the Amazon Echo.
One solution that I thought might work would be to use the SmartThings Shield and an Arduino to feed it simple ASCII commands based off of āvirtual lighting devicesā(?) in SmartThings. I have no idea how to do this though. Can the ST_Anything project help with something like this?
Any input or advice is much appreciated.
Eric,
This is 98% of what your want, already done for you. Just change the RS-232 commands to match your old lighting system and youāll be there. I did not write it, but I helped the guy who did with getting started on the Arduino/ThingShield code. He made the Arduino code very simple - just a passthrough device between ST and the RS-232 shield. Note: Youāll want to use an Arduino MEGA 2560 along with my āSmartThingsā ThingShield library (which is needed to support the extra HW UARTs on the MEGA 2560 for serial comms.)
COOL!!!
Thank you!
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Hi guys this is exactly what i have been looking for 
Problem is that the āSmartThings Arduino shieldā is not available in the UK yet, would anyone be willing to ship one out to me? I will pay via PayPal in advance for all costs, it would really appreciate that.
The Thing Shield is currently out of stock in US and has been in and out of stock all summer. Whatās interesting is it no longer appears on their Shop website either, previously it was there just showing out of stock. I hope SmartThings isnāt abandoning it!
According to one community member, SmartThings support told him that theThingshield has now been discontinued. 
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This is correct - we are discontinuing Thingshield
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I donāt feel right liking that post , but thank you for responding so quickly.
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Now that it has been discontinued do you guys know what a good alternative would be?
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Might we ask āwhyā?
Because, frankly, this is really one of the few things this platform has that no other platform has.
Thank you.
Todd
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I just recently purchased an Arduino in the hopes that the shield would be re stocked for XMASā¦ What a bummer.
Is the Arduino Wireless Shield a good alternative?
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoWirelessShield
The response I got from supportā¦
Thanks for writing in. Unfortunately, weāre no longer selling the SmartThings Shield, and have yet to locate a suitable alternative that we can recommend. Please let me know if there is anything else I can answer for you!
Some people in the community have used particle in the past:
Particle has just announced an open beta for raspberry pi which might substitute for some of these use cases.
But the hardware other than the pi is more expensive and youāre going cloud to cloud so itās not going to work for all these cases.
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Oh and Sony has a skunk works project called Mesh which is really interesting. Itās a bunch of Bluetooth tags, and one of them is a GPIO. The development kit runs on your phone or tablet. And from there you can get to IFTTT.
Again it will substitute for some use cases, not others.
Not 100% sure, but I think on an android device you could combine this with Tasker and SharpTools and stay local.
@joshua_Lyon would know better.
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In addition to what JD has posted above, there are many other methods which have been explored in other community discussions. For example, you could use an ESP8266 board (~$10) which can be programmed via the Arduino IDE and has built-in WiFi. This could then be connected to the ST cloud via the Hub as shown in this discussion:
Others have implemented cloud-to-cloud integration via IFTTT or Particle.
Still others have tackled full bi-directional Ethernet communications via the hub, as show in:
At this point, I am not sure why one wouldnāt simply run an OAUTH SmartApp that exposes everything you want from the ST Cloud (including virtual devices that represent the physical devices attached to your local Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP8266, etcā¦) Then you simply have your micro-controller update everything bi-directionally.
Once upon a time, we were promised local control on the v2 Hub for our own custom code. A year+ later, and the Bluetooth and USB are still not enabled. Iāve given up hope for having the ability to run my own local code on the hub. Therefore, it is probably just best to bypass the local hub and talk directly to the ST cloud from your own device.
Very sad to hear ST has discontinued the ThingShield. This was one of the major reasons I chose the ST platform.
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Very, very, very sad day. 
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In no way am I a conspiracy theorist, but one does wonder why these are being droppedā¦
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@Mike_Maxwell I thought the same thing.
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Make you wonder if after years of ST will produce something.
-S!