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Threshold Sensor For Doorway without modding door casing

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    Threshold Sensor For Doorway without modding door casing

    Hey everyone. I am new here so please let me know if I should post this in another section.

    I have been loving HS and have had nothing but great luck so far. The problem I am having is that on the top and bottom of my staircase, in my home, I have doorways without doors. I setup two motion sensors to turn on my lights in this staircase but the latency makes it so my lights turn on once I am over halfway down my stairs making it kind of useless.

    I got to thinking that I could build something like the trip sensor on any garage door that uses an IR laser that is interrupted if someone "breaks" the line and connect it to a general window/door sensor so that it turns my lights on right away like my doors do correctly. The problem I have with that is the amount of physical equipment that would have to be installed and powered in these doorways making them ugly.

    I decided to take apart one of these GoControl Motion sensors that I have as extras from buying the pack with two door reed switches that I have found most people don't like very much so a lot of us have lying around.

    So I pulled off the diffuser and flipped the "funnel" around to kind of direct the path of light to the sensor inside. Pretty much reversing the way it was designed to work changing the field of view from 120 degrees to more like 10-20 degrees.

    I put this just inside my door frame and it has been working incredibly well. Much better than expected for sure. My lights turn on before I hit the first stair now as desired.



    I understand that this is not the prettiest thing in the world but I want to make sure that it works the way I want it to before I go through the trouble of making a new, more slimline, cover for this piece.

    The question I have is, have any of you tried messing around with photoelectric sensors to try and make a more direct path for picking up light? A small tube vs a funnel shape or different materials (plastic/cardboard/fiberglass) to see if anything works better than anything else. Curious to see what would absorb too much light and what materials might amplify light too much to make this overly sensitive.

    The only downside I have found to this, minus it being unnecessarily large, is the wait time of 4.5 minutes before it will pickup again. I know I can change this and it will eat up more battery. I am trying to find the happy medium of wait time and battery usage. But I know I don't want to have to power it.

    Hope this ignites some of you into helping to find a way to create a wireless threshold sensor so us homeowners don't have to modify a house that we will want to sell one day.

    Thank you all for your time and I hope I can be helpful here in the future.

    #2
    Very ingenious
    I would imagine it is somewhat pet-proof as well. I have used black electrical tape on some X10 sensors to 'narrow' the field of view and it works well.
    HS4Pro on a Raspberry Pi4
    54 Z-Wave Nodes / 21 Zigbee Devices / 108 Events / 767 Devices
    Plugins: Z-Wave / Zigbee Plus / EasyTrigger / AK Weather / OMNI

    HSTouch Clients: 1 Android

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      #3
      Thank you for the compliment. It has been extremely pet immune. I have two large dogs that confuse my other motions sometimes but this hasn't false triggered at all.

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        #4
        Originally posted by invisible@night View Post
        Thank you for the compliment. It has been extremely pet immune. I have two large dogs that confuse my other motions sometimes but this hasn't false triggered at all.


        Are they not allowed to have light when they go up/ down stairs?
        cheeryfool

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          #5
          Do you have any pictures you can share?

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