I need your help as I am quite new to Homey. I have only used simpler things before such as Hue and Telldus before. But now I’m learning slowly, and find it exciting and fun with what Homey can do.
I have for the first time in my life bought a motion sensor, an Aqara P1. My idea is that it should sit in the kitchen. Turn on the lights every time we go out, and turn them off 30 seconds after we leave the kitchen. Naturally, it should be lit as long as we are in the kitchen. I understand that I must make a flow that says that when movement occurs, the lamp must be lit. But how about turning the light off, 30 secounds after we have leave the kitchen? What are e.g. reset motion and blindtime that are in the homey app? If I set sensitivity to low, does the sensor “see” shorter distances then?
Hope someone can help me with answers to these questions. Little stupid that Aqara does not ship with a manual, other than how to mount the sensor.
Most sensors have a default ‘blind time’ of 60s. This way the battery can last longer, while the sensor holds the motion alarm for 60s. and doesn’t respond to motion events in the meantime.
And switching lights of after 30s., to me it’s way too ‘nervous’, but everyone has different preferences.
In the device settings, you should find an entry somewhere, where you can edit the blind time for instance.
In this topic, you find several light controlling flows, and you can import those flows:
“Reset motion alarm after”: If no motion during this time the motion alarm will be turned off. Every motion during this time will prolong the alarm-on with this time.
“Motion sensor blind time”: After the motion alarm is turned off by above setting (i.e. no motion for above time) the motion sensor will not respond to any motion during this time, this to save some battery as mentioned by Peter_kawa.
If you want it to turn off 30 s after no motion in the kitchen, but turn on as soon as someone enters, you need to set “reset …” to 30 s and “blind time” to as low as possible.
But doing this the battery will not last very long. One solution to this is to solder wires to the battery connection and connect a power supply.
Make the kitchen a zone in your home, and switch of the lights when the zone is inactive for some minutes. Make this time higher then the blind time of the sensor.
The above sensors are all Z-Wave sensors. I haven’t listed any Zigbee sensors because I didn’t found any information about the “blind time” on the corresponding websites and manuals, e.g. Philips Hue Indoor/Outdoor Motion Sensor or Aeotec Motion Sensor.
This is not exactly correct. You forgot the blind time. If motion is detected, then both, the Blind Time and the Cancellation delay (“Reset motion alarm after”), will start at the same time.
Example:
– Blind time: 10 s
– Cancellation delay: 30 s
So the sensor can detect a new motion earliest after the 10 s Blind Time. And then both times start again at 0.
You can do a simple test. Pass a motion sensor so that it only detects you for a short time. When the motion alarm has gone off again, look at the timeline of the motion sensor. Is the duration between on and off the cancellation delay, or the cancellation delay + blind time?
As far as I know, there are also sensors without blind time. These sensors resets the cancellation delay immediately as soon as a new movement is detected.
This may be indeed the case. Mostly they are cheap Zigbee motion sensors from the Far East. The setting options are also often very limited.
