Detect motion only at night?

Power & Lighting
1

I just installed my new Wyze motion sensor. Seems to work great, but…

I want to do something I thought would be straightforward - turn on a light when someone enters a darkened room. I set up the sensor to control a lamp in my living room - turn on the lamp when the sensor detects motion, and turn it off when the sensor clears. The lamp is plugged into a TP-Link Kasa Wi-Fi smart plug.

That part was easy, using IFTTT to link the Wyze motion sensor to the Kasa smart plug.

What I can’t figure out is how to have the sensor turn on the lamp only at night, when the room is dark (no need to turn it on during the day). Since the sensor itself has no light sensor built into it, that means I need to use a time-of-day schedule (ideally “dusk-to-dawn” but I can live with fixed staart-stop times) to control when the sensor should turn on the lamp.

But I can’t figure out how to apply two triggers (the sensor and a schedule) in IFTTT to trigger an action (turn on my lamp).

If I were to replace my light bulb with a Wyze bulb, would I then be able to do what I want via a rule directly in the Wyze app (and eliminate IFTTT)?

If anyone has done this before, or can offer advice on how I can do this, I’d appreciate it,

2

In the WYZE app, can you add a Rule to Shedule when the sensor is On/Off? You can for cameras, I don’t see have sensors.

3

I have a Wyze bulb set up where it turns on the bulb after the motion sensor is tripped only at night. It has an option to only run the actions if the trigger occurs between start time and end time. You set it up in the rules section under device trigger in the wyze app. You should also be able to do that with a wyze plug too if you don’t have a wyze bulb. I’m not sure if you can do that with IFTTT.

@angus.black I don’t see an option to have the sensor turned off. It only has rules where the notifications from the sensor can be turned on/off.

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4

Any idea how much of that can be done with Alexa rules? I try to keep app specific changes to a minimum since we have a few different vendors.

5

Yeah it’s available to set up as an Alexa routine as well.

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6

Great, thanks. I was afraid the sensors might not be exposed to Alexa. I have some in a starter kit I haven’t opened yet.

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7

It makes no sense to me that Wyze doesn’t provide a rule for its motion sensor to detect motion only during certain hours. It’s nice to be able to turn on/off notifications during certain hours, but being able to also detect motion during certain hours would be far more useful.

8

Can you outline the steps for how to do this?

9

Go to add a rule, select device trigger and then you can set it up from there. For more details, see this link. https://support.wyzecam.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029779552-How-to-Use-Rules

I don’t think you can turn on the motion sensor only for certain hours though with Wyze.

10

Never mind, I figured it out. Works great, thanks.

Wish there was a start/stop time option for sunrise and sunset instead of fixed times (Alexa knows your time zone, so…).

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11

Sorry I didn’t realize you were talking about how to do the Alexa routine. I’m glad you figured it out. I didn’t think to use Alexa to integrate the TP-link smart plug and Wyze motion sensor. Yeah I didn’t see an option for sunrise and sunset times.

12

I also never thought to use Alexa to create a scene using the Wyze motion sensor as the trigger and one of TP-Link Kasa smart plugs as the action. I’d already been using Alexa to control my Kasa smart devices, but not my Wyze devices. Once I added the skill to link Alexa to my Wyze account, all of my Wyze devices showed up, and I was able to easily create the scene I needed.

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