Motion sensor with second contact to create beam

Does anyone know of a motion sensor that works if someone breaks a barrier like the sensor in an elevator. Basically if someone broke the barrier of the motion beam then I would get a notification, but I don’t want the wide spread area that most motion sensors cover. Not sure if I’m doing a great job of explaining this.

It sounds you are looking for what I’d caked a beam break sensor.

I was looking at building one of these using a door/window contact sensor and the safety sensors from a garage door.

But I found an alternative and went with that instead. My use case was to turn on the lights on my stairs.

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What did you go with?

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Sorry… I should have said that.

What I wanted was for my stairway lights to come on as soon as someone stayed walking up or down them.

I tried a monoprice motion sensor, but there were two problems. 1- it was slow. I could be halfway up the stairs before it reported or even detected motion. 2- it would detect motion of people walking by the stairs through the foyer.

At the time that was my only motion sensor. I’ve sense started using the Enerwave ceiling mounted sensors and the iris sensors. Both are very good. But I still didn’t use them in the stairs.

Here is what I did… I built low light level led lamps and placed them on the stairs railings. They are dim, but bright enough to see at night. They aren’t noticeable during the day. They cost about 25 cents to run 24/7/365.

The stair lights are on automations with mode changes.

While this want my ideal fix in the beginning, I have found it to be much better than what I actually planned.

This is exactly what I did…

I’ve had some success putting tubes of various lengths over the PIR sensor to limit its field of view.
I have several placed across doorways and stairs in my home.
I heat shrink the tube to the PIR with the unit dissembled, and remove the metal tube or not depending on the use case.

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A quick google search gave me this:

https://www.123securityproducts.com/e-931-s45rrq.html?gclid=CjwKEAiA9JW2BRDxtaq2ruDg22oSJACgtTxcNXq5bGvuxLUspmTxDwVYOFF2siclEQqWcPD1pSJQBBoCnJLw_wcB

That device has relay outputs on it (both NO and NC) that you could connect to an Ecolink (or similar) open/close sensor with screw terminals. A simple adjustment to the device handler could make it report motion instead of open/close.

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I was just looking at something like that and was thinking the same thing. Will either go that route or try out the method above with putting some tubes on a motion sensor.