Appreciate that this is an oft visited subject but I wondered if anything has updated recently.
I am looking for what seems like an elusive product, an external motion detector (IP66 or above preferably) that can work with HA. Preferably Z-Wave but I’ll accept any approach that works including using a reasonably priced video camera with motion detection. (Assuming I can use the Motion Detection bit as a trigger.)
You would think this was an easy subject but hours trawling the web have not found me a neat answer.
I have one of the Hue Outdoor Motion Sensors in my driveway, and it works great. Among other things, I use it to trigger my outdoor lights from low to high brightness if motion is detected at night. It has a light level sensor and a temperature sensor, too.
It gets tripped by deer, coyotes, and rabbits (and humans of course), but not chipmunks or insects. I’m using a ConBee II stick with ZHA and, as its location is pretty far from the ConBee II, it typically connects to one of my Sylvania light strips (routers) in that area of the house instead of directly to the ConBee II.
Ah I have now read all the replies rather than just looking at the last one on my email and that’s really useful. So far this has been a surprisingly difficult device for me to find.
@erikg, I know it’s been a while since you’ve posted on your use of Hue Outdoor Motion Sensors in your driveway… hopefully you’re still going to get an alert when I reply here!
That said, I’m wondering if you had any trouble with setting up these things as triggers. I have MANY of the indoor Hue motion sensors, and expected that these would work the same. On the indoor, I’ve had good luck using the “became occupied” and “became unoccupied” as the triggers, and that works great. But when I use that exact same type of automation to turn on yard lights, no go.
Sensor absolutely logs activity when I walk in front of it. Lights absolutely work (also Hue). But I can’t get the Hue outdoor motion detector to trigger.
I still have my outdoor sensor in the driveway and it’s working great. After the recent change to the core Hue integration that modifies the sensors from local poll to local push, I moved the outdoor sensor from my ConBeeII network to the Hue Bridge network. Still works well.
I’m not using the device-level triggers, but rather the entity state triggers. For example:
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.driveway_motion_sensor_motion
to: 'on'
I use that same trigger (or a close variant) all my motion sensors, and it works with Hue Indoor (ConBeeII/ZHA or Hue Bridge), Hue Outdoor(ConBeeII/ZHA or Hue Bridge), and UniFi Camera sensors.
Maybe try the entity state version of the triggers and see if that helps for your situation? You can also use that type of trigger from the UI if you prefer that method:
Also, while I was looking at the UI for creating automations, I noticed that none of my motion sensors have a “became occupied” trigger. I checked sensors connected to Hue and those connected via ZHA, and they look like this:
Maybe that’s part of the difference? I’m running 2021.10.5 right now.
@erikg, thank you for the reply! I had so much hope that it was that simple, but to no avail. What I found interesting and hopeful is that you are using the “state” trigger type, when I had been using device. Indeed, looking at one of my other automations that works perfectly with an indoor Hue motion sensor, you can see that I’m using it as device, not state, but literally that same mechanism of saying when the Occupancy is triggered (state=on), do “something”. This works for every single one of my other automations using Hue motion sensors, but not the outdoor ones (so far).
I did actually change the outdoor automations to state, and played with that, both with the Motion detection state (on/off), and with Occupancy detection state (on/off), but it’s not working on the outdoor at all.
But get this… instead of having “…became occupied” try and turn on lights, I had it send my iphone a notification… THAT WORKED. I changed nothing other than the service it called, and it worked. I changed it back to turning on the light, and then that worked as well, almost like it had to be coaxed into using a trigger. Now, the last test is that I added back in the before sunrise/after sunset condition, so I can only test that after sundown tonight. I’ll have to let you know how that goes.
BTW… the Occupancy vs. Motion detection… seems to be a thing with many…
