Some smart home automations can truly feel like magic. Often these automations take a lot of effort to build, but there are some projects you can build in less than an hour that can make a big impact on your smart home.
Smart lighting that follows your lead
A magical automation
One of the first smart home automation built by people a smart light bulb activated when the motion detector is triggered. This automation feels magical the first time you run it. The problem is that this automation quickly fails as soon as you try to turn the lights off again when you leave the room. If you sit still, the motion sensor can’t see you and you’re plunged into darkness.
The idea of asset-based lighting is still good. This is a perfect example of what true smart home automation should be. Instead of controlling your lights with an app or a switch touch the dashboardyour lights should move on their own, turn on when you need them and turn off again when you don’t.
If you set up presence-based lighting in several rooms, you can even imagine yourself in the future like something from the hit Apple TV show. Do not quit. Your lights can turn on and off as you walk through your home, turn on when you enter a room, and turn off when you’ve just left.
Assembly of gears
Two sensors are better than one
Setting up this kind of automated lighting with a motion sensor can be a real challenge because motion sensors can’t tell you’re in the room; they can only tell when you move. And with the right equipment, things get a lot easier.
Presence sensors it can detect not only when you enter the room, but also when you are still in the room. Moment mmWave sensor uses high-frequency radar to detect smaller movements than a traditional PIR motion sensor can pick up. Some sensors can detect movements as small as the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe, allowing them to track when a room is occupied and even how many people are there.
The downside of presence sensors is that they don’t react as fast as PIR motion sensors. If you use an occupancy sensor to turn on your lights, there may be a small delay between entering the room and the light coming on.
The solution is to use both types of sensors. The PIR motion sensor can quickly detect when you enter the room and turn on the lights almost instantly correctly placed. A presence sensor can then take over and track whether you’re in the room or not, and even if you’re sitting still, it can turn on the lights until you leave.
Some sensors offer the best of both worlds and include both a PIR motion sensor and mmWave presence sensor in the same device. For example, Everything is One Being, Agara FP300and Meros MS605 all include mmWave and PIR sensors. You can then use a single sensor for presence-based lighting.
Don’t leave yourself in the dark
Leave room for sensors to fail
With the right sensors, it’s fairly trivial to create an automation to turn lights on when you enter a room and turn them off again when you leave. Automation when the PIR sensor detects motion turns on the light. When the presence sensor detects that the room is no longer occupied, the automation turns off the light.
For the most part, this automation should work fine. A PIR motion sensor will react quickly, so your lights should turn on as soon as you enter the room. The mmWave sensor should continue reveal your existence in the room, so the lights will be on. Only when you leave the room and your presence is no longer detected do the lights turn off again.
In practice, this automation may not always work perfectly. Sometimes mmWave sensors can lose track of you for a moment or two, and if you don’t account for this, you may find your lights suddenly go out while you’re still in the room.
One solution is to build a short cooldown into your automation. Instead of turning off the lights as soon as the presence is gone, you change the trigger so that the lights turn off after the presence is clear for a certain period of time, say 30 seconds. If the sensor temporarily loses you, your lights will stay on until the sensor picks you up again within a 30-second window; the lights will turn off 30 seconds after you leave the room.
True automation should work on its own
Set up right, presence-based lighting feels truly magical. you can add clarifications like detection of light levels so that your lights don’t come on when you don’t need them, or by using smooth transitions for your lights to turn on and off. In the end, you’ll end up with lighting that’s always on when you need it and off when you don’t, and you can install it all in less than an hour.
