Need help choosing a good motion sensor

[kksd15]

Hi everybody!

So I'm in this internship where my team and I have to build a motion sensor device for a museum's exhibit.

Basically, there are instruments behind glass, and we're going to set up motion sensors around or in front of the set up for viewers to trigger. Once they're triggered, we're going to play a sound and have like a spotlight on the instrument and all that. We're going to hook everything up to an Arduino.

I'm not an electrical engineer, but my team's manager asked me to find a good motion sensor device to use for our project. I've been looking online for a few hours now, but I'm not really getting anywhere. So I was wondering if someone could please help me?

I'm somewhat confused with which kind of sensor is best for this job. I know there are IR sensors and ultrasound ones. but yeah.. if anyone can recommend a specific kind, so I can go check them out, that would even be better.

Thanks so much!
KD

 

[schip666!]

Look for Infra-red PIR devices under sensors at sparkfun.com. Basically the sensing guts of your automatic porch light controller. If you can deal with the time constants, you can just use the porch light things themselves...

 

[kksd15]

okay, thanks! =]