Reddit reviews EMY 5 X HC-SR501 Adjust Ir Pyroelectric Infrared PIR Motion Sensor Detector Modules

You can accomplish this easily without a microcontroller and save your hardy arduino for another day.

http://www.amazon.com/2013newestseller-HC-SR501-Pyroelectric-Infrared-Detector/dp/B00FDPO9B8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1451959828&sr=8-2&keywords=ir+motion

These come in packs of 5 for less than $5, the output is a simple HIGH or LOW for detection, and sensitivity and time can be adjusted on the sensor itself. I used these to make an intrusion system not unlike what you have here. If you connect it to a 9v battery it could last for severals months as their standby current is <50uA.

I used Fritzing for the first time this evening to show you an example:

http://imgur.com/8C0Wa1w

Big dump describing my setup, hopefully useful to you.

Bluetooth isn't super well suited to being in every room as the range isn't so great. Wifi works much better. I've observed that temperature especially varies a lot from room to room, so having a sensor in each room is kind of hard to avoid.

What I do is take an ESP8266 (in the form of a WeMos D1 mini, which has the ESP8266 module + all supporting power and serial communication circuitry for $4) and use that as my controller for the sensors, with one in every room. You can program these with the Arduino IDE and it's a pretty great experience. These all connect to a Raspberry Pi that acts as the controller. I have the RasPi connected via ethernet to my network and also put a USB WiFi adapter, which hosts a separate WiFi network (encrypted with WPA2) just for my sensors/IoT stuff that is completely isolated from my home network and also not routed to the Internet; if a device needs to access something from the internet it has to ask the RasPi to fetch it. The WiFi adapter I got has an antenna and because the sensors all can use very low transfer rates (they aren't doing all that much) this means the range is very good - my sensors can reliably connect and communicate from outside through multiple walls.

The RasPi hosts a Mosquitto MQTT gateway, which the sensors use to communicate and also to send command and control stuff, like turning off light switches and that sort of thing. As a frontend, I'm using the excellent home-assistant, which is a very flexible home automation controller. It has support for controlling generic devices over MQTT. I use the temperature sensor data to control a smart thermostat I also made.

For sensors, originally I used DHT22's for measuring temperature and humidity, but I've since realized that they kind of suck, with terrible accuracy and precision as well as being overpriced. Instead, for most rooms I use the cheap and reliable DS18B20, which is also much more accurate. The downside is that they don't measure humidity, but I noticed that humidity in my house in rooms on the same floor doesn't vary much, so I bought a couple of the rather expensive but very accurate SHT31-D temperature and humidity sensors and put one upstairs and one downstairs. I haven't played with motion detectors, but I've been thinking about buying something like these PIR detectors and adding them. In Home Assistant, it's really easy to set up something like if a sensor with a motion detector sends an MQTT message to signal motion detected, then turn on a light.

you might try using passive infrared sensors (PIR) ..they pick up body heat and can track a person's movement.

http://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-PIR-Motion-Sensor/dp/B00JOZTAC6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1418653350&sr=8-3&keywords=pir+sensor

These are cheap enough that you could build an array of them and use signal strength to 'zero in' on a person.

http://www.amazon.com/2013newestseller-HC-SR501-Pyroelectric-Infrared-Detector/dp/B00FDPO9B8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1418653350&sr=8-2&keywords=pir+sensor

I'm going to do the same. Are you going to use a specific source code or are you going to write it yourself?

Edit:
Don't really want wait three weeks, so I'm ordering these.
https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-Version-NodeMCU-Internet-Development/dp/B010O1G1ES/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FDPO9B8/

Haven't really read yet what kind of output the sensors have yet, but I assume it's just the sensitivity, and a boolean for movement. I'll just write a little script that does a HTTP call to my node on movement.

What type of sensors are you using? Would it be possible for you to post a picture or link?

If the motion sensor is anything like these ones, it should be able to be configured to output "High" until there is no more motion. That could easily be attached to one pin of an AND gate.

 

However, without a micro-controller of some kind, the light detector would be a bit harder. If you are using something like a photo-resistor, you will read different values (Analog) based on how much light it is detecting. This is easy to interpret and compare with a micro-controller, but is a bit harder to do with discreet logic.

I would run 3.3-5V through a trim-pot, in line with the photo-resistor and then wire this into a Schmitt Trigger such as this. Typically gates have 2 voltages for which the vendor will guarantee they read high and low, but between those two, they don't make any promises, which is a problem when using analog components, as between the time it goes "High" and "Low", it will read in that grey zone. What a Schmitt Trigger does, is waits for the input to go very high before switching to high before switching the output high, and waiting for the input to go very low before switching the output low. This way, it mitigates the uncertain zone, and adds some hysteresis. Then wire this into the other terminal of the AND gate.

The particular one I linked is a Schmitt Inverter, so when it is bright and the photo-resistor decreases its resistance value, the input on the Schmitt Inverter will go high, and the output will go low, preventing the system from triggering, and vice-versa once it gets dark.

You will also want to make sure that your photo sensor is decently far away from your lamp/ light source, or else it will detect the light and shut back off

 

You can do all this with discreet logic gates, but if you do it the way I mentioned, it would still take at least 2 IC chips and 2 transistors (1 for the Light Sensor circuit and 1 to control the actual output lamp). It would probably be easier and also use fewer components if you were able to use a small chip like an ATTiny85 which is a small, 8-pin IC which can be programmed in Arduino (There are probably cheaper places to buy these than here, but you can take a look at the chip).

The problem is not with connecting the sensor with Arduino but mounting it on the PCB itself. To be specific the PIR sensor has capacitors and other components on the bottom along with the PINS. I could probably use array of pins and use that to connect the sensor to the PCB but that seems to be little fragile. This sensor and other similar sensors have drill holes in them which seems to suggest that these could be attached to the PCB, but I am not sure if I should be using normal screws or are there any standoffs for these.

I don't have any links. I combined multiple sketches to get it to do what I needed. I used a NodeMCU chip (~$8 on amazon) and a cheap 5 pack of PIR sensors

From there I looked up how to connect an esp8266 to wifi, how to publish to mqtt, and how to determine if a pir sensor senses motion.

Combined all that into a working sketch. If I could pull this together, you can too!