Motion activated light-- can't be done?

There are some potential solutions, but part of the main problem here is how the wired cameras (and most cameras in general) currently work to detect motion using pixel recognition instead of PIR.

The cameras “motion detection” isn’t actually really detecting motion. What it is detecting is enough pixels change between one frame and the next. This certainly works to detect all motion, but that is not technically all that it detects. It will also be triggered by…yep, lighting changes. Light vs shadow vs different shades will cause enough pixels on the screen to change to trigger a motion detected scenario. That means that anytime your light turns on or off, the camera will think that is motion and this will cause it to trigger your “turn on the light” rule. That’s what’s happening to you here. Every time the light turns off, the camera says there is motion and turns the light back on in a loop ad-infinitum.

I tested this issue with the new Wyze Flood light and I am happy to say that somehow Wyze seems to have fixed this looping issue. I set my floodlight cam to only turn on the light at night when the camera senses motion, and magically it is not turning the lights back on every time the lights turn off. They must have figured out a solution for this. I haven’t tested the sockets yet, but I understand they work this way too, especially since they allow you to set a timer to turn the lights off after X minutes without the cam detecting motion.

Unfortunately that fix hasn’t [yet] been extended to other devices as far as I’m aware. Therefore, using [Wyze] rules to turn lights on or off based solely on camera motion detection is probably not going to be a viable integration for at least a while.

There are other solutions though. As @spamoni stated, you can use a PIR based motion sensor to determine whether to have lights on or off. I use this method on several of my lights. Any time the sensor detects new heated motion (so a person, etc) the light turns on, once there has been no motion for X consecutive minutes, I have it shut the lights back off. That works pretty well for several situations.

Similarly, you can use a Wyze Outdoor Cam and have it’s PIR sensor trigger to turn the lights on, and have a timer of some kind turn the lights back off after X amount of time of the lights being on.

Another option is if you have cam plus you can have the camera only turn the lights on when it detects a person, then have a timer turn the lights off after X amount of time of the lights being on.

As a timer to turn the lights off automatically, some people use a Wyze plug. They’ll have a rule that also turns on the Wyze plug at the same time as the light, then tell the plug to turn off itself and the light after 5 minutes or whatever.

Wyze is currently working on a solution to train to their AI to ignore lighting changes. I’m helping them train on this by submitting example videos where nothing changes but lighting so they can learn to have those videos ignored. I also think they might be able to extend the solution they created for the floodlight and socket to not be triggered by lighting changes to also work for the rules of other cams too. Maybe we’ll actually get that solution coming up (it just doesn’t help RIGHT NOW).

Those are the best solutions I know of right now. I would recommend also recommend voting for this wishlist item so we can have triggers on the cameras for “motion has been clear for” to execute doing something like shutting off the lights:

Wyze has found some way to get the motion stuff to work on the floodlight, so I hope they soon extend that solution for other lighting rules too. Until then, the above are the solutions I know of and use.

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