Turn off after motion stops

That is really weird!! I wonder what’s causing that?

Well, that’s a problem considering the motion sensors constantly report stoppage even when there isn’t. I really wish they didn’t do that. The log gets cluttered with “motion stopped at X time” then “motion started at X time + 1 second” over and over and over and over and over again.

This actually sounds like a defective sensor. Ordinarily, a gen2 MotionSense sensor will report inactive approximately 10 seconds after motion has actually stopped. The first gen MotionSense sensors took a bit longer than that, and a gen3 I just measured at 19 seconds. If you are seeing multiple inactive events in a row, or inactive events immediately after motion stops, you have a bad sensor.

This is what it looks like. Both the motion sensor I got for free with my hub (v1 I believe) and the new Samsung Motion Sensor do this:

https://goo.gl/photos/7nv8zFRk6EBPuioc6

Those logs are in MINUTES. I’m talking about SECONDS. You have to look in the IDE Live Logging to see what’s actually going on. If you don’t like all the events showing in the mobile app, don’t look at them!

Ok, maybe I’m totally reading this the wrong way, but I am really put off by the tone of this response. I am going to assume that I am taking it the wrong way.

You may notice that multiple start/stop events occurred within the same minute. Looking at my live log, it does appear that an “inactive” event follows an “active” event by exactly 10 seconds at a minimum. I do see some cases where an inactive event isn’t trigged for ~30-40 seconds. That makes sense. I guess that’s just the nature of the beast, especially considering this is a living room sensor where people may sit still watching TV for some time.

No tone intended. It is normal for motion sensors to flip back and forth. It only takes 10 to 20 seconds of “inactivity” for the sensor to report inactive. One reason to put in a longer period for “Turn off after x minutes of no motion” is to “cover up” these “false inactives”. If, for example, you were to set the time for only 1 minute, there will be a higher incidence of false inactvies turning off the lights when they shouldn’t. 5 minutes won’t have this problem.

Consider a woman putting on makeup right in front of a motion sensor. 1 or 2 minutes WILL cause those lights to turn off when they shouldn’t, because there isn’t a lot of motion. But 5 minutes is safe. I have a motion sensor sitting right under my computer display, not 2 feet in front of me, set for 2 minutes. There are times where I’m deeply focused on something, that the lights will turn off.

If Smart Lighting didn’t have a bug, this would be no big deal. I don’t know what their bug is, since I don’t use Smart Lighting for this application (for other reasons). ST WILL fix this, and I’m surprised they haven’t yet. In the meantime, there are work arounds that do work.

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ST has evidently brought this feature to Smart Lighting in mobile app v2.0.4. You should be able to do this that way, instead of using this app. That might help with keeping automations local for hub V2.

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Can anyone confirm? @bravenel I’ve been using your app to turn off lights after no motion. But it consistently stops working after a couple weeks, forcing me to delete and reinstall to get it working.

Everyone is having this problem today, and it’s not my app that’s the cause of it. Evidently, runIn(), which is used to schedule the turn-off action in x minutes, is failing – scross all apps that rely on it.

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Well I am glad I am not going crazy. I thought I just figured everything out but I have a few lights that are not turning off as well. Good to know its not just me, bummer to know we have another bug…

I assume Smart App V2.0.4 is only available for iOS? I have Android and it is on V2.0.3 with no update available.

Yeah, we have a bug…

See the following thread:

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I have been using this app and it works great. Can you tell me what lines I would need to add to this so that it only works from sunset to sunrise?

I think I replied to the wrong thread. The app I am using is “Disable motion off if already on”.