OpenPIR as a tripwire?

Sensors Distance
1

I’m building a toy landmine for a game of laser tag that I want triggered by a simulated “tripwire.” My idea was to take the OpenPIR, remove the lens and replace it with a 2 and a half inch plastic tube slightly bigger in diameter than the sensor itself hot-glued around the base, so that the sensor is effectively at the bottom of the tube. If you can imagine a hallway where the landmine is placed on one side of the hallway pointing sideways so that the tube and sensor is facing the opposite wall, the PIR should only be able to detect heat signatures within a very narrow range – sort of like a tripwire.

I built this out, and things were working well for a time, but when I tried to slightly adjust the sensitivity, the PIR stopped working on me. I’ve since gone through 3 more, and I can barely get them to work as intended, rather than this modified application. Would this idea work with a much higher quality IR motion sensor, or is the fundamental idea flawed? Again, it was working as expected for a brief time, but no more.

Could the hot-glue have damaged the sensor? If these things are intended to be soldered, I can’t imagine a hot-glue gun would have been hot enough to cause damage.

2

That is strange. I don’t think increasing the sensitivity to max should do anything. I wonder if it is burning the sensor out?

How far to you increase the sens potentiometer? Do they fail immediately or after some amount of time? How many hours of time do you think they have before you try to increase the sensitivity? What kind of power supply are you using with them? Are you adjusting up or down?

I think a higher quality sensor would probably work better if you are running into issues with the OpenPIR. Can’t hurt to try out something else. Maybe something like https://www.sparkfun.com/products/17372 if 5 meters works. These are not adjustable in the same way as the OpenPIR is, however.