I have Raccoons shredding my lawn and want to tiger my Rachio sprinklers to turn on if motion is detected during hours of the night.
I’m having a hard time finding reliable, outdoor motion detection that is compatible with Smarthigns. I’ve read though the threads and am seeing some confusing/conflicting information about camera motion triggering support for Smartthings and what models actually expose the motion parameter.
I tried standard IR based motion detectors and they are pretty much useless outdoors.
You can try the Zooz Outdoor Motion Sensor. It’s a little trigger happy but there are settings to tame it down and you can point it to where you need to focus on.
That’s an awesome idea Though it needs a constant suppl of water to the sprinkler. It wont work with electronic irrigation valves.
I’ll need to figure out how to feed a hose to that location.
But yes, that’s the idea. If I could only find a Smartthings version of that motion detector.
I’ll read up on the Zooz.
You don’t have hose bibs? The sprinkler system in my previous house tied into the water supply with a backflow preventer. All the original hose bibs remained in place working as before.
This was a sprinkler system added long after the house was built.
I’m not positive the motion sensor sprinkler will work with small critters, you’ll want to dig in on that.
I sadly don’t have a close enough access point to use for where I’d need the hose. Also trying to keep thinks sleek and clean
I installed both the Rachio and Zooz motion detector this week. Am working on the WebCore script as we speak. As it stands, it works in principle. Though the “off” switch on a timer is unreliable. Trying both the “flash” function on the Rachio (duration (seconds), delay (seconds), cycle amount (int) ), and the “On”, “Wait X seconds”, “off” approach. Both are not giving me repeatable or predictable results. Considering an error here means I could have sprinklers running all night, I want to make sure its solid.
Ok! I got the code stabilized. The Zooz motion detector is performing really well. I dialed it in for more of a nighttime mode, and have been receiving zero false triggering so far for the past 2 days, day or night.
System is triggering beautifully with the lights kicking on and the sprinklers firing for 10 second intervals as long as they are detecting motion. So far no Raccoon visits, I hope they don’t like water
Its the the Zooz outdoor motion detector ZSE29.
I’m still not 100% sure how the lux value/sensitivity effects the triggering (they are a bit vague on it), so if you end up finding more about that please post.
Though it needs a constant suppl of water to the sprinkler. It wont work with electronic irrigation valves.