INSTEON Motion Sensor

The Motion Sensor is a battery powered device which uses an infrared detector to detect motion. Motion Sensors are wireless, so they can be easily installed without spending time running wires. When Motion Sensors detect motion, they send an "on" event, and when motion stops for a (configurable) amount of time, they send an "off" event.

Being battery powered devices, Motion Sensors spend most of their time "sleeping" (they sleep to conserve their batteries). When a device is sleeping, it will respond to motion events, but it won't listen to any events on the network. Battery powered devices will occasionally "wake up", so they can give the network an update of their internal state (battery state, as an example) and to receive any messages from the network. The time between wake ups for the Motion Sensor is about 24 hours.

Motion Sensor Device Description

The Motion Sensor Device has two output status terminals. The "1S" terminal shows if there is motion (on), or no motion (off). The "heartbeat" terminal shows that the battery is OK. Every 24 hours, if the battery is OK, the Motion Sensor Device will update the heartbeat terminal with the current state of the sensor.

Installing an Motion Sensor

Create the Motion Sensor Device by running the MotionSensor Script. The parameters for the MotionSensor Script are:

address :

• the INSTEON address of the device

port_location :

• this parameter is only necessary when there is more than one INSTEON network. The port_location is the USB port of the network's INSTEON modem. It is used to differentiate INSTEON networks. In *nix systems, this is in the /dev directory with a name like /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/cu.usbserial-00001004. Type "ls -lrt /dev/*" for hints. On Windows systems, the location is COMx where "x" is a number (1,2,3, etc.).

Example

To add a Motion Sensor Device with ID "motion" and INSTEON address "12.89.AB" to a system with one INSTEON network, run the MotionSensor Script with the following parameters:

id: "motion"
address: "12.89.AB"