"Incredible" AD110 Motion Detection Range

[GaryOkie]

The specs for the AD110 PIR sensor range maximum is documented at 16 feet, but it often detects vehicles 4x that distance despite blocking out the road and setting a very close range.

So while this distance is supposedly far outside the PIR capability, even then, the detection zone area and range specifiers don't seem to matter much. I don't know what else I can do to eliminate these unwanted vehicle drive-by alerts.

The attachment Truck_drive_by.JPG is no longer available

Red detect zone well below road. Distance range set to 1, 2, or 3 - makes no difference, and still often picks up vehicles 65' away (but not always).

NoRoadZone.JPG (52.82 KiB) Viewed 892 times

[longedge]

There's a lot of shadow from the trees in your image and it's almost certain that as the shadows move that is what causes the detection. You can't stop the wind and passing vehicles blowing the foliage around and creating the apparent movement so perhaps reduce the sensitivity right down and reduce the detection area to say the bottom 3 rows within the red bricks. See how that goes and keep tweaking it until you find the best for you. It's definitely a problem area, good luck with it

[Revo2Maxx]

Yes sadly you will be hit everytime the sun gets between the camera and the trees as stated before.. In the Grid picture it looks like a different time and the Shadows are not in the scene yet.. However once the Sun gets to the hour of the picture before with the 65' marking that whole area is deep in Shadows... Issue will be slight movement of wind or a car going by that causes wind or even the sun as it moves though the Trees will cause a movement that the camera will pick up.... As Longedge said making the Detection grid smaller might help however looking at your picture there is a good bunch of shadow in there as well... I am going to guess that using this as a Doorbell without much of a First Alert would be best because you will after some time of getting false alarms giving up looking at what is at the camera and miss something you really wanted to see...

If I haven't already said it Welcome to the Forum

[GaryOkie]

Thanks to you both for your very helpful observations and advice! I had the mistaken impression that a PIR sensor was not susceptible to movement from shadows. Further study, along with your comments, set me straight. I will reduce the detection zone as advised, even though I had wanted to include movement on the circular drive immediately in front of the porch.

I have the AD110 nicely integrated with Home Assistant, receiving immediate motion and button press alerts via SmartHome>phone/Tasker>HA service calls that trigger Telegram messages along with snapshots and/or video. This integration includes logic that reduces annoyance alerts from HA/Telegram in various ways. Unfortunately there isn't any way to communicate with the AD110 to also toggle motion detection on/off automatically like I could with the Skybell doorbell.

An even worse situation than wind/shadows is people activity hanging around in front just talking, watering plants, etc. Alerts can occur in rapid succession several times a minute. At the very least, there should be a SmartHome option to limit # of alerts in a given timeframe, configurable in minutes.