Using Motion Detector to keep lights on?

[JDRoberts]

Welcome! (I’ve moved this to projects so you can get individualized responses based on your own setup.)

The short answer is that you can set it up however you think it will work best for your family. But it is true that the motion sensor is going to send a report when it detects motion and then send another report when whatever its reporting period is up and it has not detected motion. But what the system does when it receives those reports depends on the rules that you set up.

It’s quite difficult to have a single motion sensor cover an entire room. So the first thing to be aware of is that many people will put two or three motion sensors in a room and combine them into a zone so that activity in any zone will count as activity for the purposes of something like turning the lights on.

Next, it’s completely up to you whether you have the lights go off based on the motion sensor or not. You might decide to have them go off based on something else, even just time of day.

Speaking of time of day, you could have different rules for different times. For example, on school days, say Monday through Friday, You might want to have the lights come on when someone enters the room, but have a longer period of inactivity before they go off, maybe 45 minutes. Just to pick up all of those fairly quiet times.

Then in the evening when you’re not expecting people to be in the school room unless they’re going in there to get stuff, you might change it so that the lights will go off after 10 minutes of inactivity. Again, it’s your choice how you set up the rules.

You could also combine the motion sensor with other kinds of sensors, like a sensor on the chairs or a sound sensor. Of course, that means paying for more devices, which might not be worth it to you. Different people will have different interests and requirements.

So the short answer is that you were absolutely right to think about what will be needed to keep the lights on. But as long as you’re willing to invest in a couple of extra devices per room, it’s quite likely that you can set it up pretty much the way you want.

You will particularly find core useful, as it lets you do stacked conditionals, which is usually what you need for this kind of situation:

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

Also, an interesting thread on office chairs that might give you some more ideas:

Smart Chair

I decided to experiment with the smart multi’s today. I had two extras after my move. I had the crazy idea that I could strap them to the chairs in my home office and use them as presence detectors. It works. But in looking at the data, I think I could do more. Just wanted to put this out to the collective and get some opinions. My first experiment was trying to detect taps on the arm rest. This seemed to work OK, but will require a new SmartApp. Second experiment was trying to detect if I am leaning back too much or not maintaining the correct posture. Any other ideas?