Motion Sensor Continual detection results in lights off

Installation
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1

Hello, I am completely new to HA & Zigbee2MQTT and I’ve got everything setup and work in my house except for one thing. Motion detection. I was able to create a simple motion detection and it works great for most rooms, but there is one room (exercise) where constant motion occurs at times and the hue motion detector successfully detects the continual motion… however the lights which I have set on a timer go off because there is no change of state. If I watch the sensor state, it shows 5+ minutes of “detected” while the timer ticks down to zero and the lights go out.

Are there any suggestions on how to fix this? I am not that skilled in coding or understanding the helpers & all the HA functionality. I tried setting up a few additional automations that would count time but the no-code automations doesn’t appear to let you do this as the drop-downs don’t have options to look at state, they only offer From & To. and since there is no state change I can’t figure out a no-code way to do this. I also tried to hack through a few logical options of timers and toggles but none of them worked.

So I assume this is been figured out and I’d reach out to the community for some help. and feel free to dumb it down like I’m a total noob :slight_smile:

2

You shouldn’t need a timer. If you have a “turn on” automation and a “turn off” automation…

triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.motion_sensor_motion
    to: "off"
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 5
      seconds: 0

…in the “turn off” automation will only trigger if there is no motion for five minutes continuously.

Once you’ve got it working you can look at ways of combining on and off into one automation. There is an example here:

Motion activated lights automation

3

Thx Jack, I’ll try this. I was coming at it from a different angle of trying to continually renew a countdown timer… I’ll see if this way works, it’s much simpler.