Re: X-10 Mister House Motion sensor problems

[Larry Moss <moss@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2006-06-07, Robert Green <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> May I ask you to start again from the top to explain exactly what sort of
> behavior you want or expect to see from your HW and SW?  I'd just like to
> get a resummation of the basic problem under a new thread heading so you can
> get the maximum number of eyes reading about your problem.

Sure.  The basic "problem" is that when I walk into my laundry/utility room
with my arms full, I want the lights to turn on via motion sensors.
There's about a 4 second delay before the lights come on.  It's not a
serious problem.  I just take a few steps in the dark knowing the lights
will kick on.  I'm just trying to figure out why it's taking so long.  It
hasn't bothered me enough to remove the motion sensors, but I find it
somewhat irritating.  I just want a faster response.  I could add another
sensor at the top of the stairs so by the time I get down to the basement
the light in the other room is already on.  But that isn't identifying the
source of the delay.  That's just working around it, and not efficiently
since I might not be going into the utility room.  (If I'm not carrying
laundry or a lot of tools, I can flip a light switch easily, so I haven't
added more motion controlled lights in other areas.)

Here are the details:

The motion sensor is an rms18.  There are actually two.  I don't think it's
ever possible for both to see me at the same time.  The transceiver is an
rr501.  The computer is connected to a cm11a.

I haven't figured out a good way to accurately time the delay when I walk
in the room.  Right now, just looking at a watch as I enter the room, I'm
seeing about 4 seconds after I pass the first sensor before I see light.
In the MH log, I'm seeing the computer recognizing the MS and turning on
the light either the same second or the following second.  The timer
resolution shown in the log is only a second.  Not sure if I can get it to
show finer resolution than that, but I'm not sure that's necessary anyway.
It clearly takes less than a second between the time the computer sees the
signal on the power line and responds.  Hmm, I just added something else to
the log.  It was printing to the log that it was turning the light on and
then sending the command to the cm11a.  So I added a print statement after
the ON command in case the delay was in executing that.  What I'm generally
seeing now is MisterHouse sees the signal from the MS, reports that it's
going to turn on the light and then that it has turned on the light all
within the same second.

So, the computer/software shouldn't be the delay.  Unless there's some
oddity in the cm11a driver MH is using.  I suppose it's possible that the
main MH program hands the command off to a driver that then sits on it.
I'm not familiar at all with MH internals, so I don't know how it's
handling that.  I'll have to post some of this to the MH mailing list if no
one here has a good answer for me.

--
Larry Moss, http://www.airigami.com
PO Box 23523, Rochester, NY 14692, (585) 359-8695
Airigami: The art of folding air in specially prepared latex containers.