Over time my setup has been increasing reliant on motion sensors to trigger events, but one thing that has plagued the effectiveness of this has been the batteries dying in the motion sensors – When things stop working I don’t immediately know what has gone wrong and with some motion sensors only being tripped by exception I never knew if those ones are working.
Until I was reminded of the dawn/dusk feature of the MS13s in a thread on these forums. My MS13s had been set up in the default mode which only trigger on motion. There are other modes and the interesting one is mode 3 – in this mode motion is triggered AND dawn/dusk on unit code+1. And I use this to check the battery health of the units.
First I had to re-unit code all my motion sensors and change them to mode 3. I chose even unit codes for motion and then the odd unit code is the dawn/dusk. I created new devices for the dawn/dusk codes and a variable per unit. Then defined an X10 recieved trigger action each of the dawn/dusk codes and write date & time to the variable each time its triggered. Finally I have a timed action which occurs once a day and checks the state of each of the variables and if it is today. By exception it emails me that the batteries need changing in a given unit.
I’m sure this logic may already be apparent to some, but I’m posting it here in case it is useful to others. The AppleScript that this uses is all pretty rudimentary (and my coding skills are poor) but I’ll happily post the scripts if anyone is interested.
-Nic