Motion Sensing with Alexa

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1

Hello and thank you to all who support this community. I posted earlier but accidentally hit solved and don’t know how to “unsolve”.

I have two smart light sockets in our laundry room controlled by Alexa. I bought a zigbee motion sensor and added it to my HE. I imported the device into Alexa and made two routines. The first routine turns the sockets on when activity is detected. The second turns the sockets off after no activity for 1 minute. The first works fine if I walk in the lights come on. The second doesn’t work at all. It never turns the lights off no matter how long no activity is reported. The sensor events in HE shows when the sensor detects no activity but it goes t appear that the Alexa routine is being triggered. I feel like I’m missing something simple. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

2

Just click the Solved again.

As to the real question, can you post a screen shot of the Alexa routine?

3

When I try and add a picture I get a message saying “you can’t embed media items in a post.

4

That will pass as you get a few more posts, but maybe we can get @bobbyD to lift it early.

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5

That is a system measure to protect the community against potential spam. I have lifted the restriction manually for you.

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6

Oh okay I understand. It’s a pretty simply routine the name is Laundry Room inactive

The when is:
When Laundry Room Sensor detects no motion for 1 minute

Then the actions are:
Laundry Room Light 1 set to off
Laundry Room Light 2 set to off

And that’s it

7

Thank you!

Here is the screen shot

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image1125Ă—2436 163 KB

8

Hmmmm… It looks good, but I wonder if the for 1 minute is causing an issue (don’t remember seeing the option until recently).

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This is the first time I’ve used a motion sensor I thought maybe 1 minute wasn’t long enough for some reason so I changed it to 5 minutes. No difference. It’s like the second routine never runs.

10

What happens if you remove the restriction?

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There doesn’t seem to be a way to remove it but I can set it to 0

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12

I’ll give that a try. Thank you for your help.

13

I guess my question is why don't you do this through hubitat using the simple automation rule? This way you don't need to rely on a cloud based device to go out to the internet, go to their servers, only to come back from the internet into HE to turn off/on the device. A much simpler way would be to use Simple Automation rule.. As you can see with this rule, it turns on both the over head lights and the sconce lights when motion is detected, then goes off after 5 mins of inactivity. (This would ensure that if I walked back in then the rule would reset).

Edit: Are the sockets no pairable to HE?

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image1547Ă—824 33.4 KB

14

This makes complete sense. Unfortunately the dockets do not appear to be able to be controlled by HE. They are WiFi sockets that are controlled by Alexa. Thank you for the support though!

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15

With those I'd suggest setting up a virtual outlet/switch and then add routines to Alexa that tell it to turn on/off the WiFi device based on the status of the virtual.

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16

This sounds like the ticket. Thank you!

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17

That would have been my next suggestion (Why I went back and edited my response :slight_smile: ) That said, If you can, replace those sockets with some lifx bulbs. That way they're 100% local instead of relying on the cloud...

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