Motion Sensor, IFTTT and SmartThings Making it All Work

Devices & Integrations
1

I hope that I am putting this in the spot, if not, my apologies.

I currently have a SmatThings hub, open/close sensors, motion sensor, a few hue lights, a hue hub.

I purchased the motion sensor so that I could trigger the kitchen lights to come on when someone is in the kitchen which consists of 4 hue lights. So I figured I would be able to just set a simple IF motion is detected THEN turn on these four lights and then crate another one so that when no motion is detected, turn those lights off. I am unable to figure out how to accomplish that.

I don’t see anyway to set motion as a trigger… so I went to IFTTT and wanted to create a recipe to do just that… unfortunately it doesn’t give you the ability to turn on a “group” of lights, so I would need 4 recipes, one for each light. A minor pain, but oh well…

Now I want to turn them off, and I don’t see any way to set a trigger for motion NOT detected? Am I missing something here? It would seem to me that one of the most basic things anyone would want their light to do is to turn on when they enter a room and turn off after they leave the room… I figure I must be missing something, if we can’t accomplish at least that, I am loosing faith in my connected home.

Thanks, any help would surely be appreciated.

2

I would use the dashboard section to do this. If you don’t have a lights and switches section in your dashboard. hit the + at the bottom of the mobile app. go to Things/light bulbs/select hue/top actions and alerts then select turn on with motion. Hope that helps.

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3

You may want to try our iOS app, SmartRules, which makes setting up rules for your home very easy. It is much more flexible than IFTTT and much easier than a custom SmartApp.

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4

Thank you very much! I am on my way to give that a try!

5

Thank you Greg I will check that out…

6

One thing I forgot to mention is that in the dashboard section you can set up a “light” that actually consists of a group as you mentioned. so the motion event would control all 4.

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7

Hopefully with the next major UX update those “Dashboard” tiles will be more intuitive to create. I had a motion sensor for a while and didn’t realize I could make a Dashboard tile out of it until I saw someone’s screenshot.

Here’s to hope!

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8

Thank you all very much! I was definitely missing something! :smiley:

9

There are different ways to do this in the official smart things mobile app, but neither is obvious or intuitive. They do both work well though. See the following topics, they should help. Or as others have said you can just use one of the third-party created rule engines.

Brief explanation of the different methods:

Detailed explanation of how to set up a light group:

Further discussion of some quirks if you do this through hello home actions rather than through a shortcut group:

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