How do you make a burglar alarm with light sensor?

All of these are active sensors. They inject energy (light, microwaves or sound) into the environment in order to detect a change of some sort. The "motion sensing" feature on most lights (and security systems) is a passive system that detects infrared energy.

These sensors are therefore known as PIR (passive infrared) detectors or pyroelectric sensors. In order to make a sensor that can detect a human being, you need to make the sensor sensitive to the temperature of a human body. Humans, having a skin temperature of about 93 degrees F, radiate infrared energy with a wavelength between 9 and 10 micrometers.

Therefore, the sensors are typically sensitive in the range of 8 to 12 micrometers. The devices themselves are simple electronic components not unlike a photosensor. The infrared light bumps electrons off a substrate, and these electrons can be detected and amplified into a signal.

You have probably noticed that your light is sensitive to motion, but not to a person who is standing still. That's because the electronics package attached to the sensor is looking for a fairly rapid change in the amount of infrared energy it is seeing. When a person walks by, the amount of infrared energy in the field of view changes rapidly and is easily detected.

You do not want the sensor detecting slower changes, like the sidewalk cooling off at night. Your motion sensing light has a wide field of view because of the lens covering the sensor. Infrared energy is a form of light, so you can focus and bend it with plastic lenses.

But it's not like there is a 2-D array of sensors in there. There is a single (or sometimes two) sensors inside looking for changes in infrared energy. ­ If you have a burglar alarm with motion sensors, you may have noticed that the motion sensors cannot "see" you when you are outside looking through a window.

That is because glass is not very transparent to infrared energy. This, by the way, is the basis of a greenhouse. Light passes through the glass into the greenhouse and heats things up inside the greenhouse.

The glass is then opaque to the infrared energy these heated things are emitting, so the heat is trapped inside the greenhouse. It makes sense that a motion detector sensitive to infrared energy cannot see through glass windows. See the next page for more information.