I recently got a brand new Philips hue motion sensor. I set it up first with the Hue app and the reaction time was great, the flexibility with automation though was very limited. I wanted to disable the sensor when my bed was occupied but I could only do time with the hue app.
I therefore tried making the automation with the motion sensor that automatically appeared in Home Assistant under the Hue platform.
Unfortunately the reaction time was up to 5 seconds which is just not good enough for me. I might as well just turn on the switch. The hue app was only 1 second at the most. I also tried the custom component but it was still not as fast as the Hue app.
I went looking for a solution and the only other possible solution was using HomeKit automations. These were very limited though, they don’t even let me set conditions! The new shortcuts app in iOS 13 wouldn’t let me add motion detection as a trigger either so neither worked great. They did work almost instantly though.
I remembered that I was already using Home Assistant with HomeKit and found a way to make it work.
Therefore for this trick to work, you will need an iOS or macOS device with the Home app. You will also need the Hue bridge to be directly integrated to HomeKit.
First, create an input boolean, then expose it to HomeKit.
input_boolean:
hue_motion:
homekit:
filter:
include_entities:
- input_boolean.hue_motion
Now, in the Home app, create two new automations. The first should be when motion is detected by the sensor and the other should be when it stops detecting motion. The automation should turn the input boolean called hue motion should turn on when motion detected and off when no motion detected.
It should look like this:
Now you can add a template binary sensor to Home Assistant so it looks much nicer:
- platform: template
sensors:
bedroom_motion_sensor:
device_class: motion
value_template: >-
{{ is_state('input_boolean.hue_motion', 'on') }}
You should now have a super responsive Hue motion sensor to use in Home Assistant. For me there was a most of a one second delay which was about the same as directly through the Hue app. Having automations with Home Assistant is a lot more powerful though.
Hope that this could help some having the same issue as me!
