Thinking about adding motion detection to your smart home?
Today we are going to setup and review the EcoLink Zwave Motion Sensor.
Stay tuned.
[ INTRO MUSIC ]
Hi again, John Stone the DIY Smart Home Guy
here to talk about the role Motion sensors play in the Smart Home.
When most people think about motion detection,
they think of the security aspect.
While this is an important factor,
we are going to explore motion detection for automation and control.
In my video about the smart garage door opener,
which you can find right here and in the comments below,
I showed you a robot that turns on my garage light when the garage door opens.
What I didn’t talk about are some of the schedules that automatically turn the garage light off.
These are handy for when I forget to turn the lights off manually.
But even with the schedules, if I forget to turn the light off,
it can remain on for several hours for no reason.
This is where Zwave motion sensors like the GoControl, Linear or EcoLink come in handy.
Today we are going to look at the EchoLink motion detector which uses
Passive Infrared also known as PIR.
The sensor hangs on your wall and sends status updates to your smart hub.
There are only two signals, and those are: motion started, and motion stopped.
Inside the box you will find the motion sensor, a battery, a mounting bracket with screws
and double-backed tape, and the instruction manual
with text that needs a high-power magnifying glass to read.
Let’s get started by connecting this thing to our smart hub.
The first thing you need to do is open the sensor.
If you want to spare your fingernails, use a small screwdriver to open the clip on the top of the sensor.
Once it’s open, you will see the slot for the battery.
Over in the Wink App, you're going to want to select the hub.
This will take you to a selection where you can add the product.
Click on add product and scroll down until you find Sensors
Click on the Add Sensors
And then scroll to the bottom of the list
select Zwave sensor
go through all of the rest of the warning screens
until you get to the connect now.
Once you see the Connect Now
This is the time to put in the battery.
The hub is going to search for the new sensor
it may take
10 ... 15 seconds maybe
but at the end you'll see the success screen.
And that's it, you're done.
now it's time to get the sensor set up inside the app itself.
put it in a place that will allow the sensor to see a majority
of where you will be working.
If you have pets, you can use this jumper to set the sensor to ignore small or large pets.
There is also a setting that will monitor for motion every 5 seconds.
This is known as test mode
However, this will run your battery down faster.
I am going to use the default setting that will wait 4 minutes after a detection before it looks for another event.
Let’s put the sensor back together and mount it in the garage.
Ok, so I am going to use the mounting bracket, and you can see
that the sensor will only go onto this one way.
Now this bracket has these angles on the side
what mean that you can put it into a corner.
I'm going to hood it flat onto the wall
but you will see on the back that there are these
little insets here
And this will just slide in on there.
And it will hang on the wall
So it's important that you get this right side up, because if it's upside down, the sensors upside down.
Alright
So let's get this on the wall
Ok. First screw in. And were gonna grab a level.
Get this leveled off.
Alright
Now for the second screw.
There we go
Second screw's in place. And then we just ...
drop the sensor in
should be good to go. Let's go back to the Wink app,
and get this setup
now that the sensors in the garage, we are going back into the Wink app
and we're going to setup a couple of robots.
The first robot will be to turn the garage light on when it detects motion.
Back on the Robot screen in the Wink hub
The new Robot will be
ON
I like to start it off by telling me what it's going to be doing. So, it's ON
garage
Motion
Alright, so I put motion in there so I will know when I read the robots that this is a motion
robot that turns the garage light on.
And somethings got to happen.
Motion sensors
And it's already set there to do "detect motion"
And that's showing the Zwave sensor. we save that.
And then the time is Anytime
And we are going to come down to the garage light.
and we are going to say
turn that on
Save
And then we have the "Done" up here in the right corner.
And we save that.
So there we have the new robot
for motion detected in the garage will turn the light on.
So the first thing we are going to do here is go back
to our lights list
and we'll see that garage light is on
and let's turn that garage light off.
Now we'll go down and we're going to trigger that motion sensor
and see if it turns that garage light on.
that's what we should expect to see
Ok, so you can see the garage light up there. Let's walk
walk out in here and we're just going right out in front of that sensor
and she turned on.
Perfect. That's exactly what we wanted to see.
So on the downside of this sensor, I tried to create a robot
to automatically turn on the light
I succeeded in the effort except for one small thing.
I used the feature in the Wink app
to only turn on the light between sunset and sunrise.
and it didn't work
In fairness, I don't know if this is the Wink app
or the sensor that is having the problems.
I have other sunset to sunrise robots
that work just fine.
So who knows. I need to play with that a little bit more.
The distance detection of the sensor seems to work as expected
So no problems there.
All in all, it's a useful piece of technology
that is a happy addition to my smarthome setup.
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