So I happened to be awake last night and my upstairs hall lights turned on. Finding this kind of odd since no one in my house was awake, I looked at the log window since I had it open. Sure enough my 2nd fibaro motion sensor reported motion.
Has anyone else seen this type of random behavior?
Call the Winchesters.
By chance, did you notice a sadistic laughing coming from your Echo devices at the same time?
All kidding aside… Looking at logs, had the device reported in battery or temp at any reasonable interval before the motion?
What can happen is that the device falls off the network for any reason (or its nearest repeater does)… Like interference. The device finally rejoins the mesh, and has stored up several events and sends them to the nearest repeater it joined. These delayed messages get sent to the hub for processing. Viola, ghost events…
Every device seems to handle caching of events differently and each device has only so much storage… Since events aren’t time stamped on devices with no internal clock (most don’t have an understanding of time) they are just blasted to the device.
To solve this problem, we have to understand how each device handles caching of events when off mesh and how it normally sends packets vs a blast (if it even does it) and then potentially disregard the blast, or detect the rejoin event if at all possible, and then just do a refresh on the current state of device and use that.
It’s not an easy thing to solve, and this is all in a generic sense… Not sure if the fibaro’s cache events or not…
Motion sensors can be tripped by a lot of different things as well, so things like HVAC firing up, sunlight or car lights… Or even the supernatural 
LOL! Well lets hope it’s not Supernatural!
So there were other events like LUX and Battery reported about the same time. My kids Hue Flood turned off in her room also which is a straight shot from this hall way motion sensor. I figured it may have been that light turning off, but then I second guessed myself because the Paranormal is scary and I like to not sleep.
The only time I’ve received false motion events was on a ST motion sensor where the battery was just about dead (even though reported > 33%). I originally thought it was possibly low voltage to the sensor that was giving false readings but Patrick’s explanation sheds some more light on this.
I had nothing but problems with the 1st gen ST motion sensors and false motion detection. I put it in a box wrapped in plastic and the thing would still report false motion… Turned out it was dropping off the mesh, rejoining, and guess what, its default check in message back in the day was “motion” go figure…
Those things were also horrible as the battery started to die. Had to replace them all. But they are usb powered and when on usb power they act as zigbee repeaters…
Well… now the basement motion sensor triggered the light to turn on when no one was home. This motion sensor was a SmartThings motion sensor. I am starting to think it’s Paranormal.
You don’t suppose the smartThings hub is causing some interference, do you?
But do they? I thought the first-gen ST motion sensors used a custom ZigBee profile, so it’s not clear to me if they repeat for ZHA devices. I know Hubitat didn’t support them originally when I tried to pair them, due to this custom profile, and my understanding is it still doesn’t. (If that’s changed, by the way, I’d love to know—I actually like this sensor, and it’s worked well for me but hasn’t been used since I moved to Hubitat.)
I have a 1st Gen ST Motion detector (the one with the external USB power) working on Hubitat as a Generic Zigbee Motion sensor. The motion is properly reported, but no battery level. Also, I do not believe I can detect the transition from USB to Battery power like I could with SmartThings. Not sure about the Zigbee repeater functionality.
You’re right! They must have changed something because I remember staff saying originally that this wasn’t supported due to its custom ZigBee profile. The same was also true for the v1 MutliSensor, which I see they also recently added support for.
Speaking of MultiSensors, that’s how Hubitat paired my v1 motion sensor: Manufacturer: SmartThings Product Name: SmartSense Multi V1 Model Number: PGC314 deviceTypeId: 138
Changing it to “Generic ZigBee Motion Sensor” works for reporting active/inactive, which is really all I need (I never trusted the battery level, anyway). Thanks!
Ok. Now I am starting to believe that we do have something paranormal going on. This morning at 5AM our alarm went off so I jump out of bed to investigate. I go downstairs and find our door to the garage is open. I investigate the house and there is no intruder. The hubitat logs show no activity other than the door contact sensor being open.
To be honest we think my daughter didn’t shut the door all of the way and a gust of wind must have pushed it open. It was windy here last night.
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