"Talkative" Iris v2 motion sensor

I have a fleet of these which are really Centralite 3326-L that I ported over from ST and generally speaking, they all work well. However, I have one in particular that after resetting and joining to Hubitat, constantly shows motion when there is none. Yesterday while away from the house, it sent 200+ notifications of motion when HSM was armed.

I have done the usual troubleshooting including a new battery to no avail. Any suggestions or advice?

You might try leaving the battery out for a long time, say an hour, then doing the reset procedure when you put the battery back in.
:man_shrugging:

My two suggestions are to try a completely different battery (which you've done) and to remove and reset it, and then pair it to Hubitat again.

I'm guessing it didn't act like this on ST.

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Correct, it did not, this is new behavior. I am curious and will try to look today, but there is a green flash when it detects motion. I am wondering if it is actually detecting something, or this is a hub issue...

If there is a green flash more often than 20-30 seconds, it is possible the sensor is in "demo" mode.

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I have about 15 of these Iris v2 3326-L motion sensors paired with my HE hub. They all are very well behaved.

When I was buying these in bulk off of eBay, I did come across one of them that would pair successfully, but would then never detect motion. I tried all of the possible reset options to no avail. So, it is possible for these to simply go bad, IMHO.

Hopefully you have a spare sensor that you can swap out for this problematic one.

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I've had one or two of these go bad myself

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How does one put them in demo mode?

During the pairing process, if the button on the side is held too long after inserting the battery they can enter that mode. If I remember correctly, there is also a quick flash of a different color (blue?).

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I'm leaning towards the "bad one" camp...

I have 4 hubs covering my house but only one of them has the Zigbee Radio enabled and devices paired. about 4 weeks ago I decided that it was time to migrate off that old hub and on to a new one... something I had been putting off (dreading) for at least a year.

During the move of the devices from one hub to the other, I had 2 hard fails.. both Iris v2 Motion Sensors. One had the physical button die.. I had to solder a jumper to it and use that to press the button during battery insert to get it to go into pairing mode. Other than that, it's still working just fine. The 2nd is still not hanging on a pairing. I put a battery in and it starts blinking blue (pairing mode) forever. The Hub finds it, but never creates a device/completes.

BOTH of these v2's worked every day, all day, right up to the moment I needed to move them. One is just that button, but it's still a fail that occurred that only appears during hub moves (new pairing).

It's possible they are just getting too close to their end-of-life. Which is really sad since there's no easy replacement. (Size)

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One quick question - while you had these 3326-L sensors paired with your ST hub, did you allow them to receive the OTA firmware update for them? The final firmware for these motion sensors was much better than earlier versions. It was a bit of a crap-shoot as to what firmware came with these when they were purchased.

For the first batch of 3326-L sensors that I ordered, I initially paired them to an Iris hub just to receive the firmware updates. Later, after Lowes shut down Iris, I used my old ST v2 hub to pair later purchased sensors with, just to update the firmware.

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For some reason I thought that HE could now update the firmware on these, but the other day I acquired a used one and added it to my mesh, and I see that it is on slightly older firmware (firmwareMT: C2DF-001F-11005310) and there is no update button. So I guess not. (Is that correct, @mike.maxwell ?)

I have 25 of these on my mesh, and I've managed to break 2 by dropping them. But those just stop reporting motion, and I can't find anything physically wrong I can solder. I use them as temp sensors.

If you reset them, and don't hold the button down for longer than while you insert the battery , you will eliminate demo mode as a possibility.

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I believe they were updated, yes. All of mine appear to be on the firmware ending in C005310

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If they all came from ST, then shouldn't they have the latest firmware?

Agreed... However I seem to recall that there was an option in the Groovy IDE to disable OTA updates. :thinking: But it has been a long time since I used ST. And I have no idea if that option still exists in the 'new' Groovy-free ST world.

We don't have any firmware images for centralite devices, ST was able to get them before centralite went under...

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  • What driver are you using? Possible wrong driver.

  • Cover the sensor with a piece of tape to rule out it's not caused by real motion in the room.

  • Mesh issue killing your battery. Even a new battery won't last long with weak zigbee mesh.

Demo mode will flash multi colors and not just green.

  • My guess would be a weak mesh killing your battery hence the false motions. Well, there's that spider on the house too.

Can't be a weak mesh, it is literally 10 ft from the hub.

It is flashing green every two minutes though, so going to pull the battery and see...

You will be surprised with zigbee. Sometime they picked the weirdest route. I have 2 sensors on a fridge and one decided to pick a repeater 20 feet away when the hub is literally 5 feet away.

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So, going to probably write this off as a bad sensor. Pulled battery and left for 30 mins, still happening.

Driver is the generic ZigBee motion driver.