Now available for pre order at Amazon, listing an
October 2 release date.
I ordered 4.
And a reminder once again: we still don’t know whether the new Hue motion sensors will be visible to SmartThings or not. It could end up being a parallel means of control, like the Hue dimmer switch or the Hue tap.
That is, SmartThings would know if a bulb attached to the bridge came on that had been triggered by the motion sensor, but it wouldn’t know anything about the motion sensor itself.
That will still work for my purposes, but it’s just not yet clear whether the Hue motion sensors could be used to trigger other SmartThings events. We’ll just have to wait-and-see.
Congrats! I am right behind you, I am just reorganizing and reassessing every gadget I have. I probably will preorder at least 4 or 5 shortly I was just about to upgrade my rooms to NYCE ceiling. I’ve been testing one and it works very, very well. In places where I have 2 sensors I could put one NYCE ceiling, but then I saw this Philips Motion picture…
I’m saying that a DTH can access the Hue bulbs and Hue Hub directly. And that the Hue API makes it possible to send / receive sensor info. Plus the Hue sensors appear to be Zigbee, so i don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be ST compatible.
Lots of people have tried to get the Hue dimmer switch to work directly with smartthings. The problem is that unlike Hue bulbs connected directly to the SmartThings hub, the dimmer switch keeps dropping off the network.
See:
A typical post from that thread:
Unfortunately for me it doesnt work. No matter how many times i add and remove,… after 30 - 60min the connection is broken everytime… really annoying… otherwise the dimmer is perfect for the setup i have in mind.
If you think it’s possible to access the dimmer switch through the bridge so that it could be used as a button controller, I know there are a lot of people who would be very interested in that. I just don’t think there’s a way to get the button presses communicated on over to the smart things hub when the dimmer switch is connected to the bridge.
The problem is that the way smart things currently gets information about a bulb is to query the bridge. The dimmer switch doesn’t have a status most of the time it just sits in a “Ready” state. Then when someone presses it A message is sent to the bridge, but I don’t know anyway to pass that along to the SmartThings hub.
So I would think the same issue would come up with the motion sensor. If it’s connected to the bridge, I don’t think there’s a way to make the bridge tell the hub when the motion sensor is activated. That’s a very different control dynamic than for a bulb.
But maybe its event reports will be visible to SmartThings , it would be great if they are.
First reviews coming in. My housemate got his yesterday and we found it to be pretty similar to the following review:
Almost Plug and Play for a Simple Use Case
It’s super easy to set up. Out of the box, it’s ready to go as soon as you assign it to a room. At that point without your doing anything else detected motion will turn on any lights in that room attached to the hue bridge (including GE links or other brands).
It will turn on to full brightness between eight in the morning and 11 at night, but there’s also a lux sensor so it won’t turn them on at all if The light level is above the lux threshold.
From 11 at night until eight in the morning, it will turn them on at a dim “nightlight” level.
And after 15 minutes of inactivity, it will turn them off again. Those are all the presets. And that works just fine for many people.
There is some ability to customize it, but it’s pretty limited. You can change the light sensitivity, and there’s a very nice feature where you can see whether the current setting would trigger in the room at the present light level.
You can add up to two additional rooms to the same motion sensor so it can turn on a zone of lights.
Or instead of having it turn on all room lights, you can have it trigger a Hue scene. Getting this configured is not intuitive Unless you’re already used to scenes is in the new Hue app, but it can be done. Note however that a Hue scene is limited to the lights in one room and a light can only belong to one room so it will be very different than what you might be used to from some other apps.
A 24 hour day is always divided into two periods. “Day” and “night.” Night begins when day ends and vice versa. In order to change the ending time of day you change the beginning time of night.
At first it seems like you should need three time periods, one for daytime, one for evening, and one for late night, but because of the built in lux sensor Phillips assumes that you can get by with two . The lux sensor make sure that the lights don’t come on during the day if it’s bright.
So as long as your use case is simple, this is a very nice device. The review I linked to said there was a lag, but we found at our house it was quite quick, around half a second. We set it up in a room that already had the same model bulb and a smartthings branded motion sensor and the hue rule beat the ST rule every time, although not always by much.
Since my housemate just wanted the lights in the dressing room (which are hue whites in a cabinet fixture) to come on when he walks in there, he’s really happy. All of the presets work just fine for him.
The bad news: only the hue bridge can see it
The bad news is that at least for now the motion sensor activity is not reported to any external system, not even HomeKit. Nor SmartThings. So it’s just like the hue dimmer switch or the tap switch. The other systems can recognize a light coming on that was triggered by the trigger device, but they don’t get reports of the activity of the trigger device itself. That means it only works for one thing: to trigger hue lighting. That will work for some use cases, but not all.
So this is one of those devices that works great out of the box for many people, but will not handle the complex use cases that SmartThings power users are used to.
After my housemate’s initial tests on Sunday looked good, yesterday I had my one and only techie aide set up all four of the new Hue motion sensors, moving all of the remaining GE links that we had over to the hue bridge so we could use those with the Hue motion sensors.
And in the last 24 hours, three of the GE bulbs have gone off-line to the Hue bridge (“unreachable”) and it turns out that when they are unreachable, that the motion sensors won’t trigger them. The hue brand bulbs continue to work great.
So much for that plan. It’s not a super big deal, we’ll just need to get an additional three Hue Whites to complete the plan we had. I’ve got a Walmart gift card lying around we can use for that. But it’s still annoying!
Other than that, that hue motion sensors have worked well for our purposes.
edited to update We put in the replacement hue whites, and everything works great. The motion sensors continue to be very quick. We have one room that has a Hue bulb in a table lamp and a Lutron light switch and we are able to have the hue motion sensor turn the light bulb on and then HomeKit turn the Lutron switch on because the light bulb came on. There’s a noticeable lag, not horrible, but it’s OK because the table lamp comes on quickly and then the overhead follows it. So once you know that’s going to happen it seems to be acceptable to everybody.
So you should be able to do the same Process through SmartThings: Hue motion sensor triggers the hue bulb, Smartthings realizes that bulb came on and then does something else. It’s not perfect, but it will meet some use cases.
Yes, there’s a toggle switch, but it’s an extra tap deep into the app. You select the gear, then accessory set up and then there’s a toggle on each sensor.
I wonder if a dev could use the following link - seems like openHAB have successfully been able to see the motion sensor (I know ST and openHAB are different but hopefully it might help someone):
Do to the lack of answers I assume no one out there has got this to work directly with the ST Hub.
Shame as these look good and I am looking for something to replace my less than reliable ST motion sensors.
There are several Z wave motion sensors available in the UK which generally work well, including Fibaro and Aeotec. You might consider one of those. (The Philio and Orvibo motion sensors are also available in the U.K. and are less expensive, but community members have reported more problems with those brands.)
I am far from an expirienced SmartThings dev however I have noticed that each time I pair my Hue Motion Sensor the finger print seems to change between
It’s a ZLL device, which is actually very cool. Per the standard, a certified ZLL device should fall back to the ZHA protocol when paired to a certified ZHA coordinator, but the interesting thing is I don’t know if this actually is certified, or if they’re treating it as a manufacturer proprietary device. ( which is allowed under the zigbee standard.)
Out of curiosity is anyone else working on this device? So far I have managed to get the following data out of it:
Battery (un-calibrated)
Temperature (seems accurate)
Motion (I don’t have any other motion sensors handy to compare behavior too but its works, Also it has an annoying red light on it when it detects motion - that cant be great for the battery)
Illuminance (this is something I know very little about, in a dimly lit room i am going a value of about 80 and with my cellphone flashlight full on the sensor its about 160, I have no idea what the scale is here or how to translate it to lux)
Code coming soon - At the moment it looks like someone ran it over with a truck and it is 1am for the second time (damn DST) so I think sleep is in order.
Note: This is with the sensor paired directly to the ST hub and without a Hue hub involved, I suspect we will not see a Hue hub solution that is usable - to much latency. Unless Hue gives us something new.
I’m not a coder so if you can knock up a device handler for it that would be great.
I have a second hand one of these that I picked up cheap.
Would love to get it working so I can dump my ST ones that keep giving false motion readings.
I was just about to upgrade my rooms to NYCE ceiling. I’ve been testing one and it works very, very well. In places where I have 2 sensors I could put one NYCE ceiling, but then I saw this Philips Motion picture…
