Presence / Occupancy vs Motion

[JDRoberts]

@Glen_King

So I’m imagining a ceiling mount motion sensor that also includes some sort of ‘sonar’ or other rangefinder. A plug-in, not battery operated device. When it detects motion, it takes a range reading. Below a certain threshold, it says “occupied” - and above that threshold, it says ‘vacant’. And whatever that reading is remains in-place until the next time it takes a reading… which is the next time it detects motion.

Seems this would be pretty straightforward (and inexpensive) with the range sensors made for robots.
Might have been an interesting candidate for the now-defunct ST Shield.

You can do this now by hanging a tennis ball on a rope, hanging it from the garage ceiling, and putting a tilt sensor either on the rope or inside the tennis ball.

A lot of people use the hanging tennis ball anyway as a marker to tell the driver where to stop the car as they’re coming into the garage. This just gives you a networked indicator that the car is there.

And there was a community member who built a car detector, let me see if I can find that one.

Here you go: this one is a lot more complicated than just the tilt sensor tennis ball method, though.

Smart Parking Spotter by Todd Wackford

Building the Hardware This project builds on previous work that I found on the internet. There is a very good tutorial by AptPupil that will get you an operating ultrasonic spotter short of SmartThings. Here is the link to build the Parking Spotter: The tutorial uses a home-built controller (freeduino), but I used an Arduino Uno R3. It was an easy change. It also uses a 4 pin SRF04 Ultrasonic Ranging Sensor. I used a “Parallax Ping 3 pin Ultrasonic Sensor”. So I used the hardware instructions from AptPupil and the Arduino sketch from www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Ping . Once you get the spotter working. Go to the project section “Integrating SmartThings” (page not done yet). Here’s a pic of the finished product installed in my garage. [Photo not found]