Interfacing PIR motion sensor with Raspberry Pi

Question

I was trying to write a simple Python to detect the motion sensor output and print a message on the screen.

My connection was like below:

Raspberry Pi model B+

VCC of sensor: 5V (Pin 2) of Pi GND of sensor: GND (Pin 6 on Pi) Output of sensor: GPIO2 (Pin 3 on Pi)

am using the GPIO.BOARD congugration and I directly set my Pin 3 as input

When I read from this pin, it is always HIGH (Really surprising!)

Now I just change the connection as below

VCC of sensor: 5V (Pin 2) of Pi GND of sensor: GND (Pin 6 on Pi) Output of sensor: GPIO17 (Pin 11 on Pi)

I just change a variable called sensorpin in my code to 11 an everything works as expected!!!!

I do not understand what is the difference between using pin11 and pin3.... while both should have functioned as GPIOs.

Can anyone please help?

Milliways · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-27 04:36:43Z

2

Pin 3 & 5 are intended for I²C and have 1.8kΩ pullups to +3.3V.

answered May 27, 2016 at 4:36

Milliways

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Milliways, thanks a lot for your answer. After you mentioned it, I connected an LED to this pin and I realized what you are saying. Once again thanks a ton for the answer.
– shankar narayan
Commented May 27, 2016 at 6:06
I should add a small (entirely self-serving) point to this: gpiozero would guard against this. As of 1.2 it knows which pins have physical pull-ups and any attempt to use such a pin as an input with pull-down (e.g. by constructing MotionSensor(2)) will result in a PinFixedPull exception with an appropriate message. However, we don't support BOARD mode.
– Dave Jones
Commented May 27, 2016 at 11:01

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