Trying to create a timer to pause a loop in python

Question

Here I go messing with timers and motion sensors again.

I have a PIR motion sensor connected to a raspberry pi. I want to have the motion sensor have a cooldown of one minute before it checks for motion again. I've been messing around with threading some... but I don't think I need that for this and would like to keep it simple.

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
PIR_PIN = 11
GPIO.setup(PIR_PIN, GPIO.IN)

motion_cooldown = 60
start = 0

while True:
    if(time.time() < start + motion_cooldown):
        print("cooldown")
    else: 
        if PIR_PIN == 1:
            print("motion detected")
            #do some stuff
            start = time.time()
        elif PIR_PIN == 0:
            print("no motion")
            #do some stuff
            start = 0         #reset start to 0 so the loop continues

The current error I'm getting is " '<' not supported between instances of 'builtin_function_or_method and int" I assume that means I can't compare an int and the time.time() but I swear of done similar before and it worked fine. Any suggestions welcome!

Answer 1

This is likely to happen if you have not called the function, that is when you do something like start = time.time, but your code does not do that, and it is not reproducible. For pausing the loop you can use time.sleep(60) at the end of the while loop