Change, on the fly, the brightness % using motion sensor

This might get a little long. I'll give a simple example of what I'd like to achieve.

I have a light in the bedroom that is controlled by an Insteon Motion Sensor. I want the light to be controlled from 8:00 AM to 11PM. and off otherwise Currently the sensor is not directly tied to the light since it would turn on all the time when seeing motion. when you might get up during the night. So in Indigo I check for a true for the motion sensor and then check the time and only output to turn the light on/off during the proper times.

The problem with this method is that ,at times, Indigo takes too much time( over 10 seconds sometimes) to turn on the light when I walk into the room. Apparently its doing some other things. I have over 250 devices in the house. So the quickest method is to have the motion sensor have a direct link to the light.

I think I might have a method that I can achieve this. When you manually link the motion sensor in Indigo to add it as a controller to the light device you indicate the percent of brightness. That brightness percent , I think appears to stored in the light device not the Motion Sensor. So when the light device gets the proper motion sensor command to turn on it uses that value.

What I was thinking to do, since the light device stores that value to use for a particular motion sensor, that if I could send a RAW command to the light device I could change the value that it would use. So at 11:pm I would send a 0% brightness value to the light device for that motion sensor. Then when the motion sensor sends the ON command it would use zero as the light level.. Conversely at 8AM I would send the command to the brightness of the light device to 100%..

Is this possible? Would there be a RAW command or maybe it is already known, that could change the brightness value in the light device? This would benefit me in other places in the house as well.

Thanks ahead for any input on this.

My 2¢ would be to go with Zwave. Much faster and more reliable. I’ve found Insteon sensors to be pretty useless.

Carl

Thanks for the info on Zwave devices.

I pretty much know why some times there are delays but the main thing that I'm after here is to know if there was a way of sending a RAW command or some sort of command to the light device that when the Motion sensor goes on that it would go to that brightness level.

[jay (support)]

I pretty much know why some times there are delays but the main thing that I'm after here is to know if there was a way of sending a RAW command or some sort of command to the light device that when the Motion sensor goes on that it would go to that brightness level.

I don't believe the brightness for the link is stored in the lamp (the responder) but rather in the controller (the motion sensor) such that when the controller activates the link it sends that data to the responder. I may be wrong, but I'm fairly confident that's how it works.

I, too, suspect it's Insteon and not Indigo that's causing your delays. Z-Wave is generally much better at these sorts of things than Insteon given protocol differences.

I did a test. I have the brightness currently set at 100% and the light would go to 100% when the motion sensor was tripped. I then removed the battery from the motion sensor and went to indigo and set the brightness to 25%. via the light device link. I then reinserted the battery in the motion sensor and when tripped it went to 25% . So from that it seems like it is stored in the light device.

I thought that if I could emulate the same action that Indigo performs to set the brightness that I could do it on the fly with a Raw command. I was looking at the RAW command stiff but could not figure out the proper command to use.

One thing I noted that if I do a bunch of device status requests like when you click an icon on Indigo touch. And during when it is executing the status requests , which can take seconds) Indigo will wait till it is done executing all of the requests before sensing a motion sensor trip.

[matt (support)]

You are correct that the receiving module (light/lamp module in this case) stores the brightness for its scenes (links). Unfortunately, the commands to add/remove/edit links are pretty complicated. Different modules support different commands for link management (some peek/poke standard commands, some take extended commands) and editing a link requires knowledge of the links memory location in the module. So while I wouldn't say it isn't impossible it is pretty darn complicated. If you have a few cases where speed is critical (like this), then I think using Z-Wave for those modules would be the fastest and most reliable (and easiest) approach.

It seems like the Insteon team could have been more simplified in communication with devices.
Anyway, I'll have a try at a few Zwave devices.

Thanks for the quick response and information.