Consider the Adafruit PIR (motion) sensor (aka PIR Motion Sensor, if you’re in Canada). Simple, reliable device, but only runs from a 5 V supply. Yes, there are smaller PIRs that run off 3.3 V, but if this is what you have, you need to do some soldering. Annoyingly, the sensor on the board is a 3.3 V part, but the carrier was designed in Olden Tymes when King 5 V ruled.
You can try powering it from 3.3 V, but it’ll go all off on its own randomly as its own power supply won’t be supplying enough voltage. There are a couple of sites on how to modify these PIRs that either describe old kit you can’t get any more, or do it completely wrongly. Just one post on the Adafruit support forum gets it right.
One way of doing this is to provide 3.3 V directly to the output pin of the voltage regulator, and ignore the 5 V power line entirely. The regulator’s a SOT89-3 part that looks a bit like this:
In the photo above, it’s flipped over. Whichever way it’s oriented, we want to put power directly into the Vout pin. There may be easier points to solder this to than a tiny surface mount pin (almost definitely one of the capacitors) but this has held for me.
How to use it in MicroPython? Like the TTP223 capacitive touch sensors I looked at before, a PIR gives a simple off/on output, so you can use something like this:
from machine import Pin
from time import sleep_ms
pir = Pin(21, Pin.IN)
while True:
print("[", pir.value(), "]")
sleep_ms(1000)
value() will return 1 if there’s movement, 0 if not. There are trigger time and sensitivity potentiometers to fiddle with on the board if you need to tweak the output.
Just remember: don’t connect the 5 V power line if you make this mod. I’m not responsible for any smoke emitted if you do — but I can always sell you a replacement …
