Zigbee Motion Sensor

A Zigbee motion sensor on a rotating head. The ball turns in its base, so once the magnetic holder is on the wall or the ceiling you aim the lens exactly where you want it, across a 110 degree arc, and leave it. The holder is magnetic, so it lifts off in your hand to be re-aimed or moved.

• Aiming a Zigbee motion sensor is half the job
• It logs, it does not only notify
• What it can set off
• Zigbee keeps it off your Wi-Fi
• Which of our two motion sensors

A Zigbee hub is required and is not included.

Aiming a Zigbee motion sensor is half the job

Most sensors are a box you stick to a wall and then live with wherever it happens to point. This one is a ball that turns in its base across a 110 degree arc, so you fix the holder once and then aim the lens at the doorway rather than at the ceiling fan. The holder is magnetic, which means the sensor lifts off in your hand: re-aim it, move it to the next room, or take it down to change the battery without unpicking any adhesive.

It logs, it does not only notify

Every trigger is written to the app with a time against it, not just pushed as an alert you may have been asleep for. That turns the sensor into a record of when there was activity in a room, which is a different and often more useful thing than a notification: you can look at the morning after and see when the store room was entered.

What it can set off

Anything else on the same account. Motion at the gate brings up a camera feed so you can look before you go out. Motion in the corridor after midnight brings a lamp up dim through a smart switch. Motion in front of the television wakes the room. The sensor is cheap; the value is in what it is wired to.

Zigbee keeps it off your Wi-Fi

It draws very little, so the battery lasts, and it never appears in your router table. On a house with cameras already competing for bandwidth, keeping the small sensors on a separate radio is the difference between a system that stays responsive and one that stalls at the worst moment.

Which of our two motion sensors

This is the rotating ball on a magnetic holder, 110 degrees. The Zigbee PIR sensor is the other one: a swivel stand, a wider arc and a CR2450 coin cell. Take this one if you want to move it around and re-aim it often; take that one for a wider fixed view.

A Zigbee hub is needed either way, and is not included. We sell the Tuya Zigbee gateway and one with an IR blaster built in. Tuya, whose platform runs the app, is at tuya.com.