I’ve been having trouble with my front porch motion sensor light, plus I wanted something a little more aesthetically pleasing, so I came up with a solution involving my Ring doorbell and IFTTT I thought I’d share if anyone else was interested.
I put a non-motion outdoor light on the porch and wired it to a smart switch. At first I created a simple IFTTT recipe for IF motion was detected on the Ring, THEN turn on the light. I then had a SmartThings lighting automation turn the light off after 5 minutes.
The issue I ran into was that this caused the light to turn on no matter what time of day it was.
To fix this, I created a virtual switch that was a momentary tile, then had IFTTT turn on the momentary tile as opposed to turn on the smart switch. Then in the ST app, I created a lighting automation to turn on the smart switch if the momentary tile was pressed after sunset.
I hope this helps someone else. If you have a more direct way of accomplishing the same thing, let me know.
Hi. Can you let me know what you used to turn your light off again? I’m just getting started with all this. I have IFTT set up to turn on my Hue Porch Light when motion is detected. But not sure how to turn it off again. I looked at the Lighting Automatons, but I do’t know what the trigger would be.
My porch is covered so there isn’t an issue with a motion getting wet. I have coach lights on a zwave switch so I put a zwave motion on my porch. I have it set to turn coach lights on for 5 mins between Sunset and Sunrise when motion is detected. I’m in Houston, 100% humidity all year around and the motion has been out there 2 years as of this month.
I use this SmartApp “If Motion Detected Turn on Switch”
I use the ST Lighting Automation to turn it off. User the “Power Allowance” trigger, then you can set it to turn off after “x” minutes (in my case x=5)
Do you know if there is any way of doing this such that it only turns off if it was initially turned on by the Ring IFTTT trigger? I’d like it to not turn off at night if I’ve manually turned the light on.
I had the same problem. I moved my Ring integration over from IFTTT to Stringify and they have nice timer mechanics to shut the light off after X minutes. And conditions that it won’t trigger if the light is already on.
I know its one more program to install and that’s kind of a pain. But I pretty much only use Stringify and ST now. Stringify has a lot of the things that IFTTT does and allows for more finesse. And their support is surprisingly responsive. I mentioned that their system coudl see all my ST items, but all my sensors were not available. The designer contacted ST and updated his program in less than 24 hours. Pretty fast response in my opinion. https://www.stringify.com/
Sorry for a delayed response, I haven’t been on in a while. Using the Power Allowance worked just fine. If someone triggers the Ring motion and IFTTT tells ST to turn on the light, then this lighting automation will turn it off after 5 minutes.
You are replying to a post which is three years old. A lot has happened in that time, and I imagine the original poster has found one of several ways to make it work by now.
