Philips HueMotion Sensor - Exclusively for Philips Hue Smart Lights - Requires Hue Bridge - Easy, No-Wire Installation

I've been with the Phillips Hue ecosystem for a little over a year and a half completely happy. I thought I would never buy a motion sensor to be honest with you, it's funny that I'm writing this review. I have about 24 and counting of their lights bought this motion sensor for indoors and less than a week later I bought two outdoor motion sensors for back in front of the house just because of the experience of this one.It's sensitive, very customizable, and connectivity is excellent because it uses Zigby/2.4 Wi-Fi the more products you have lingering around like for example the lights, sensors, door connectors, etc. they transmit a signal creating a spider mesh type of web to allow the object to talk to each other and send the commands making it more accurate even if your Wi-Fi isn't perfect. I still would recommend a decent Wi-Fi or possibly a mesh Wi-Fi system. Now this is meant to work with the Phillips Hue Bridge so if you're looking at this, there's a 99% chance you already have a bridge. (Plus know this)The battery life is excellent. It uses a standard Hearing Aid type of battery. The flat kind Phillips estimate replacing every two years they may even extend a little more depending on how much it being triggered or used. I would say that it's good value for the money, considering all the options and things you can integrate into your personal smart home.It's pretty straightforward straight out of the box. It's ready to work once you pull a little connecting slip off the battery. It comes with the mounting type of connection basically a regular screw that you screw into the wall and combination with your sensor and it permanently stays on there.Now, if you look at my image, I didn't use any of that but it's on the wall how? The back mounting of the unit itself pops out it's basically a little rubber magnet that would separate the nail that goes into the wall. What I did is buy a small quarter type of magnet with M3 adhesive in the back of it for indoors, of course put that on the wall and simply just connected the motion sensor on it. Because the back is magnetic, you can mounted without drilling anything into the wall. But like I said, it's your own personal taste. It's in the area of the living room that has massive amount of traffic.I like the ability to remove it without drilling into the wall and it holds completely secure because the rubber of the connects onto the unit itself has a very strong magnet, plus with the combination of the other manget I have on the wall. It's like it belongs there no wiggle. Easy in/out and it still has some resistance so it's not like it can be yanked out rapidly of course you don't have to use this method. You could just simply set it. Something 6 feet in height or on top of the table or wherever you needed. In my application at work better hereCustomization within the app is pretty straightforward. Once you basically pair it and find a place for it. You can set a 24 hour clock setting for example: I have mine set at 7 AM in the morning till 7:30 PM at night to not mess with the lights anytime after that would be considered nighttime, so if it's dark, auto turn on the lights, which you can customize by the way. It also works perfectly in unison. If you have an automation with your Phillips Hue set up by having it turned on and off during sunset and sunrise your personal lights so you can combine it with and it will start working like a normal sensor if it's dark. It's great for putting something in the hallway, etc. or simply a high tropic area but you have to tweak it. That way you don't have the lights triggering on during the day unless of course your house is more dimmed and you prefer it that way and don't mind the occasional lights going on and off (during day) you can also set a timer for them. Shut off in 2 minutes, shut off 30 minutes, etc.Mine are pretty much set on sleep mode during the day because my house is very open with tons of lights coming in. You can tweak it including the sensitivity. It's one of those things. It's very hard to describe. You have to do it yourself each house and place a different. And the cool thing? When you're tweaking it, it allows it to flash a light in front of the sensore to let you know: I can see you! and from there move the dialer sensitivity up or down. This includes the light sensitivity, including motion.Each motion sensor can only hold three specific zones/room: I have living room, hallway, and kitchen. This is for when somebody wakes up because the rooms are located in the hallway to go into the living room and it will trigger turning on the lights on the hallway, dimmed the living room, halfway dim and the kitchen fully 100% brightness. Our house has multiple rooms, not only in the hallway but in the opposite section. Also not everybody goes to sleep at the same time if they're in the guest bedroom and they walk out it can trigger the lights and set safe for example, 10 minutes for them to go get water food and then go back to do whatever they're do if somebody wakes up to go to the kitchen hypothetically or the guest bedroom or outside the light will manually turn on.You can set a timer for indoors. I have mindset primarily for 10 minutes. This is kind of irrelevant, but if you end up buying an outdoor motion sensor, like I did, set the outside timer for whatever time you want the lights on, but in my usage, 2 min for outdoors only. I have it set so when my dad comes in randomly late at night from outside the parking area. The lights will trigger the outdoor lights only and then when crossing the indoor motion center (this one) will trigger all the other indoor lights, but keep them permanently on up until he manually changes of himself or leaves. This is perfect for the days that he comes to grab his fishing or hunting equipment at 4 AM in the morning. He doesn't need to touch anything just walk in and grab the stuff and go and the lights shut off in preset 10 min.The best part about this? Is that every time the person processes the sensor the time reset this is perfect so when he's going around getting his gear, making coffee, or going to the bathroom. He has to cross the center, which constantly triggers it the timer to reset. Which allows him to basically do whatever he's doing and leave for the night and I don't have to worry about the lights and he doesn't have to worry about it either.There's also a failsafe inside the app I believe it's called do not disturb when you set everything up including the lights and the brightness and which rooms to turn on etc. turned on do not disturb. This is a good feature because of hypothetically you came in and you manually changed the lights to turn on and the sensor won't shut them off if it's notices lights are being used. My situation is mostly active from 7:30 PM at night time up till 7 AM. If it notices, the lights are being used inside the house it won't mess with them or trigger them on or off.

Good sensor that is easy to install and very reliable. I've only had it fail once to turn on the lights out of 8 months. Even then, all I had to do is leave the room and come back 5 seconds later and it started working again. Battery life seems to be good. Still on original batteries after 8 months and the sensor is used daily.

Okay so first of all, this unit is great. It includes a temperature sensor, light sensor (measures lux in the environment), and of course a motion sensor. It operates off of batteries which, after more than a month, still shows as basically 100% in the app. The batteries are 2x AAA, so easy to replace when needed. Since it's battery operated, you can put it anywhere without any install unless you want to permanently mount it somewhere. You can adjust the sensitivity of the sensors so they trigger actions more (or less).From the Hue app, you can set how you want it to behave. Only want to enable it when the room is dark (determined by the light sensor and whatever trigger value you set)? No problem. Only enable it after 10pm? Sure. It's quite powerful.There are some missing features that could be implemented though, some of which do have workarounds. And accessing the raw data (sensor states and values, etc) is actually quite easy with the Hue Hub since it has an accessible REST API. So here's my situation, and an example of how I was able to work around a missing feature that I wanted.The Goal: This motion sensor sits in my bedroom to turn on all of the lights when someone walks in or is active in the room. It needs to "see" most of the room because I don't want dead spots where the lights just shut off because it can't see I'm in there. However, I don't want it to ALWAYS turn on the lights when it senses movement, because even at the lowest sensitivity setting it "sees" when I move in my sleep and causes the lights to come on.The Missing Feature: While you can turn the motion sensing of this unit on and off via its settings in the Hue app, there is currently no way to completely disable the sensor. Sure, you can say "From 10pm to 6am, when you detect motion, do nothing." That effectively gives you the same result. But it doesn't work for the problem I'm trying to solve, because what if I go to bed late? What if I get up early? What if my fiancée wants to sleep in longer than me and I inadvertently trigger the lights when I get up?The Solution: My house primarily utilizes the HomeKit ecosystem (i.e., Apple Home) and it integrates with Hue allowing you to complete some actions/automations/shortcuts with calls to Siri or by activating them manually via the Apple Home app. It doesn't support the motion sensor directly, but I set up a Raspberry Pi running Homebridge to create a "dummy switch" with the name "Motion Sensor". I then created two shortcuts - one that submits a REST API call to the Hue bridge to completely disable the motion sensor (leaving the others intact), and one to enable it. I then set the "Motion Sensor" switch to call one of those shortcuts whenever the switch is toggled. I added it to the Bedroom zone, so at that point I could enable/disable the motion sensor with Siri: "Siri, turn off the bedroom motion sensor.") Apple Home already has a couple of default Scenes that you can modify to suit your needs, one of these is "Good Night". I added the "Motion Sensor" dummy switch to this scene with instructions to toggle it off.So now, I can say "Siri, good night" and it will turn off all of the lights in the house, turn off the TV and fan, and disable the motion sensor in the bedroom. I then created a similar "good morning" that turns the motion sensor back on (among other things) when we're both awake.