I have made a bed occupancy sensor. The point of it is to lock the doors, turn off the lights in the house and so on when I get in bed. It also will let Vera know if I haven’t gotten up in the morning so it can give me a wakeup reminder. I will of course do a lot more with it in the future. I plan to put one on the other side of the bed so Vera know if I have company and can behave differently. I also plan to put them in places where I sit so lights won’t be turned off due to a lack of motion.
That is a very good question. It is under my futon. I sleep on a very firm futon which rests on tatami on the floor. This thing would be repulsively obvious under my sheets. It would probably be fine though on a regular bed. It’s not crinkly or anything like that. Usually these bed occupancy sensors are placed under the sheet. I needed to find one that wouldn’t be tripped by the weight of the futon alone. While I was awaiting delivery of the scat mat I made a mockup of pressure sensor consisting of a fixed coil of tubing filled with fluid and caped with an adjustable pressure sensor from an automotive AC system. Turns out that the mat only really responds to point pressure and not general pressure so much so it works great in my configuration. It is more responsive though when pressed directly.
I think a bed occupancy sensor is a pretty cool idea. Like cool enough to commercialize. There are probably tens of millions of parents of teenage kids who would love to be able to use something like that just to stop their kids from sneaking out. Ere are probably tens of millions more who would be paranoid about their younger kids being kidnapped to want such a device.
For personal use I like the idea of being able to trigger scenes like “if bed sensor = off between hours of 11pm and 6am, turn on the hallway and bathroom light” etc. that would be cool. I’d pay for something like that.
Well all of the parts are readily available and they are easy to put together.
Last night was my first time sleeping on it. I have a scene which turns all the lights off, locks the house and then Vera Alert wishes me a good night. There is a problem. Some times when I move it triggers the bed sensor telling Vera that I got up and immediately got back in bed. The result was Vera Alert wishing me a good night at random times throughout my sleep cycle. Sucked. There is a description of how to make a simple circuit on the HomeSeer board that will eliminate this. I’m going to have to cook one of these devices up. I was hoping it wouldn’t do this since it’s under my futon. I was thinking it would distribute my weight. I’ll report back once it’s sorted.
You can solve that problem with a few simple scenes, since you’re using a door sensor as your interface.
Scene “Go sleep”, runs when the sensor is armed and triggered, turns off the lights and whatnot.
Scene “Get up”, runs when the sensor returns to normal (untripped). It disarms the sensor, and re-arms it after 10 minutes.
That will prevent the scene from being started if you roll over or get out for a moment.
But won’t this hasten the death of the batteries? The sensor will still be up and sending signals all the time. At the very least it’s a great solution until I have time to build the circuit.
Using scenes to arm/disarm sensors will not affect battery life of these sensors. As a rule these sensors only transmit when there is a change (contact opens or closes), when the sensor wakes up as per its scheduled wakeup interval, or on a tamper or low battery condition. Unless your kids jump on the bed a lot, battery life should be normal no matter how you program your Vera
These sensors themselves do not have the notion of being armed / disarmed; it’s purely a condition introduced by Vera.
I don’t think it’ll be that much of an issue unless you move a lot. As an alternative to adding additional circuitry (which would also use up power), you could consider powering the door sensor from an AC power supply.
How exactly did you wire the mat to the Everspring? Did you disconnect the mat from the control unit?
How thick is the mat? The Amazon description gives the dimensions as 12"W, 58"L, and 2.5"H. I assume the 2.5" height is the control unit on the end, not the mat itself?
Right and right. It’s maybe a centimeter thick. It’s fairly unnoticeable. But the thickness doesn’t matter much because it’s under my futon. I opened up the box with the siren and removed the wires from whatever they were touching. It’s a simple mechanism.
So I built the circuit previously mentioned to delay the signal to the door/window sensor. It’s a slam dunk. This system is now 100% functional. Until I set it up things were pretty bad. I had one day during the week when I didn’t have to get up waaaaaay before the Sun. When I was stretching and repositioning myself in bed the light kept going out on my daughter in the shower. She thought I was doing it intentionally (because some times I will do that kind of thing. Especially if I’m out of the house). Those days are gone. I want to put these sensors EVERYWHERE!
