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    Motion and Occupancy

    How are you doing motion and occupancy?

    I was a long time user of DooMotion (rest in peace Jim), but once I migrated to HS3 years ago, I had to come up with an occupancy/motion activated light strategy since the old plugin no longer worked.

    Anyways, I have been doing it this way for years. And it works but I was wondering if there are better ways.

    Here is my scenario:

    I have an old Napco Gemini Alarm system with the plugin by nfrobertson (works great).
    My alarm system has several wired and wireless PIRs which I can use as triggers.
    When I walk into a room, I want the lights to come on.
    When no motion is detected for say 30 minutes, I want the lights to turn off.
    When I walk back into the room before the 30 min time has expired, I want to reset the occupancy and start over.
    When my wife presses the light switch, I want to occupancy to reset and manually turn off (WAF factor - not all in on automated occupancy)

    Here is what I have been doing to many years:

    I have a virtual device for occupancy, lets say living room.
    I create 3 events
    -if PIR opens
    --then remove delayed event
    --then set living room virtual device on
    --then set living room virtual device off delay 30 minutes

    -if living room virtual device on
    --then turn light on

    -if living room virtual device off
    --then turn light off

    I can then add other conditions, like dusk2dawn, ect. I can also create a WAF event that says if switch triggers an off (I use insteon), then turn living room virtual device off (which then triggers the on/off event routines.

    So basically I have 3 events for my complicated motion occupancy system. Multiply that by 10 PIRs and I have lots of events.

    I am looking to simplify.

    It would also work by using timers (I just started playing with timers), but with a timer I would need an additional event and timer per PIR.

    for example 4 events
    -if PIR opens
    --then restart timer
    --then set living room virtual device on

    --if timer becomes 30 min
    --then set living room virtual device off

    Plus the 2 light on/off events

    That's 4 events vs 3.

    How are others doing it?

    Like I said it works and I do subscribe to philosophy "if it aint broke, don't fix it" but would be nice to simplify the complexity (in case I ever needed to rebuild). I got on this how long would it take to rebuild rant after the insteon debacle where they upgraded the HUB and broke the plugin access.


    #2
    Here installed wired wall mounted PIRs which are uni directional and ceiling mounted PIRs which are omni directional and recently have been switching the wall mounted PIRs to combo microwave and PIR sensors.



    That said in the house quit using the PIRs for automation years back as it was low on the WAF.

    It is very difficult to sense occupation of a room anyhow no matter how many triggers / events you run.

    Occupancy Sensor

    You can get better granularity if you embed an RF ID to the occupier of the room. Way back was involved in a natural gas facility compound (miles large - like a mini city in the middle of nowhere). We used RFID to track the employees on the compound.

    - Pete

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      #3
      We use timers although there are any number of ways to achieve what you want. For us, when the last timer hits a predetermined amount of minutes and certain other conditions are true then the house goes to sleep. We don’t need to manually set the house to a status, although we can.

      Here are are our living room start and stop timer events.
      Michael

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        #4
        Originally posted by charlesmbell View Post
        How are you doing motion and occupancy?

        I was a long time user of DooMotion (rest in peace Jim), but once I migrated to HS3 years ago, I had to come up with an occupancy/motion activated light strategy since the old plugin no longer worked.


        Like I said it works and I do subscribe to philosophy "if it aint broke, don't fix it" but would be nice to simplify the complexity (in case I ever needed to rebuild). I got on this how long would it take to rebuild rant after the insteon debacle where they upgraded the HUB and broke the plugin access.[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/LEFT]
        I use virtual devices as well. The ELK-M1G has hardwired occupancy sensors attached as zones. It's easy using ELK rules and UltraM1G plug-in to have a single virtual device representing the state of all hard-wired sensors.

        All other occupancy devices are Z-Wave which are also paired into a single virtual device.

        I do not have the granularity of individual rooms set-up for turning on/off lights but instead care more about "Are we home?" or not. Maybe not helpful for your circumstance.


        Using 6 events, I set a single virtual device to either occupied or unoccupied.
        Click image for larger version  Name:	occupancy.PNG Views:	1 Size:	16.8 KB ID:	1243334


        RIP Jim Doolittle . https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/le...-jim-doolittle

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          #5
          And then of course - the Hardwired sensors vs the Z-Wave sensors have had problems in the past - a graph such as this lets see a small bit of "history". Output 5 comes from the Elk, while the bottom graph represents the occupied / unoccupied state of the Z-Wave sensors.

          Click image for larger version

Name:	occupied.PNG
Views:	171
Size:	3.2 KB
ID:	1243542

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            #6
            Monk , what are you using to create those graphs? That look reminiscent of doomotion (I think he used an access database in the old plugin).

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              #7
              charlesmbell
              They are created using the Jon00 Virtual Device Graphing utility

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