Indigo Domotics

Recently I began adding motion sensors to rooms in my house. The first one I added was in the kitchen. The setup is basic. Walk in the room the light turns on. When the motion sensor goes off it begins a timer (2Min) that will turn the light off when it reaches zero. Unless the motion sensor turns on in which it will pause the timer. I added to only do this at night as well because there is enough light during the day in this room.

Over the weekend I moved on to the Media Room. My house is a Bi-Level and this room is on the lower level and right off the Garage. I have a motion sensor turning on a light for when you come in from the Garage. Exactly like the kitchen setup with the pause etc. The problem is when watching a movie if it sees motion the lights come up.....the lights go off....on....off the whole time. Is there a better way to control lights with motion sensors than what I am doing. I tried to set the timers longer than 2 min but if I go too long it just keeps them on longer than they need to be.

I was thinking about adding variables maybe "Movie" that might by pass the motion sensor and timers.

Has anyone done anything crafty with this concept already that you could suggest?

Your kitchen scenario doesn't need a timer - you can set the off delay in the motion sensor config. How you do it depends on the motion sensor type (INSTEON vs Z-Wave and the specific brand of Z-Wave).

Your garage problem, though, does require some more thinking. If you can reliably set a variable to true/false and use that as a condition on the trigger that turns the light on, then that would definitely be one solution.

Thanks for the reply Jay. I was doing some tinkering tonight with the motion sensor in the media room. I set up a variable "MovieMode" when set to true is dims the lights to 40% and disables all the timers and well as the main trigger that turns the light on off the motion sensor. Set to false turns it all back on. I am currently running the Plex Plugin as well so may take it a step further and when the client is true it disables everything.