Check out this great PIR Sensor Tutorial Part 1 and and Part 2 over at Raspberry Pi Spy! (Goes nicely with our recent Pi Learning System tutorial here!)

A great little sensor you can add to your Raspberry Pi projects is a PIR module. These 5V “Passive Infra Red” sensors are available for a few pounds from eBay. They can be powered from 5V and output 3V so can be connected directly to pins on the Pi’s GPIO header without any other components.

The module sets a single output pin high whenever it detects movement within its field of view. It holds this pin High (3.3V) for a minimum period of time. If continuous movement is detected the output pin will stay High. When the time has elapsed and no more movement is detected the output pin returns Low (0V).

I am currently using one in an alarm system and it works great for such a small and cheap device.

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Product

PIR (motion) sensor: PIR sensors are used to detect motion from pets/humanoids from about 20 feet away (possibly works on zombies, not guaranteed). This one has an adjustable delay before firing (approx 0.3-18 seconds), adjustable sensitivity and we include a 1 foot (30 cm) cable with a socket so you can easily reposition the sensor or mount it using the two drills on either side. (read more)

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!