I recently purchased a Mr. Beams Wireless Lighting System which is used to light specific areas in my home when there is a power outage. However, I wanted to have the stair lights come on when my kids come downstairs in the middle of the night, so I plugged the Mr. Beams remote into a GE Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control Duplex Receptacle and use a Ecolink Z-Wave PIR Motion Detector to tell it to turn the lights on. Now when my kids walk down their hallway the motion sensor tells my Smartthings Hub to turn the lights on. In this case, it tells the outlet to turn off (simulating a power failure). When this happens the remote that is plugged in to that outlet sends the RF signal to turn on the Mr. Beams lights. After 2 minutes of ‘no motion detected’ the outlet turns back on (power is restored) and the RF signal turns off the lights. It was a perfect solution for me.
Clever! I really like the quality of Mr. Beams, we use them for outdoor nonnetworked path lighting.
Any idea what the RF frequency is?
No. I tried scanning it with an Arduino using a RF 315/433 MHz transmitter-receiver module and had no luck getting the frequency to send back to the lights. That was going to be my first solution to have the smartthings shield just replicate the RF signal, but I didn’t get too far.
I’ve put a bunch of these in at a vacation rental — except, not the networked system version. They also offer a basic motion activated version that contains a photo sensor to ensure they only activate at night.
Because the light they give seems to be 5000k, I’ve also painted the lens on the inside with orange nail polish to keep the light more night-eyes friendly.
If you need to limit the area picked up by the motion sensor, you can over the lens in white nail polish or surgery.
That said, I think I’d really prefer some single gang decora style lights that can take batteries instead of needing line power.
If it’s an RF device sold in the U.S. It has an FCC label. From there you can just look up the frequency. (The label may be inside the battery compartment.)
I checked with Mr. Beams, they claim to be working an interface to ST for their networked lights. No ETA was provided but they asked what functionality would I look for. Here’s what I replied but wanted to get other inputs:
- Know if motion was active / inactive.
- Know if lights were on / off.
- Ability to turn the lights on / off (motion detected or not)
- Option to allow the device to turn lights on and off upon motion (I.e. behave normally) without ST intervention but ST knows about it
- Know the battery charge level
- Temperature (not necessary, I’d rather see something sooner than later)
- The ability to activate / inactivate Mr. Beams internal network communication to other MB devices.
I’d definitely shorten the duration of the light being on to around 30 seconds.
Also, It would also be great to have the LED be dimmable so you can set the brightness during certain times of the night. I like to use 40% when it is in the middle of the night. 100% if my ST detects and intrusion.
They contacted me to say development is progressing, possible March 2017 beta testing. Hope I can participate. Pays to ask vendors questions, this seems like a great company! I passed along your suggestions but for your first one, wouldn’t you use ST for the delay, set it to whatever you like?
Great news for sure! Thanks for forwarding my thoughts.
As far as the delay, I was thinking that their product could be configured with 30 seconds out of the box using the PIR sensor as a trigger and then, us ST users could take it further with our needs.
Ok got it. Maybe more of a soft dip switch that provides a range of default behavior: you can make it 30, I can make it 45, etc. I also updated them that sensitivity and reset timing soft switches would be important. They may actually join this community.
@Wjstefanelli did you get any further updates? I signed up for their beta testing on their site, nothing specific to this network option. I reached out, but they did not mention anything directly about this beta.
I would love to test this out and use it in my home automation.
thanks.
I just contacted them, funny you should ask! They said due to contractor issues they are behind but still working on the product integration and expect delivery by fall 2017.
I just contacted them (in UK) and asked if they were going to release anything compatible with Smartthings, and the response I had was that they’re not planning to do anything like that.