I have just moved back to Motion Lighting after nearly a year trying to get Room Lighting to work more than 30% of the time! I only have 2 rooms using automatic lighting. Motion to turn lights on and after no motion for 30 minutes turn off lights, as well as Echo voice commands to turn lights off or change lighting levels to 100%. Not advanced at all IMHO. When it works it is great!
Am i the only one who has given up after my issues of it not working reliable enough?
My system is made up of three HE hubs, with 150 zigbee and zwave. Mostly zigbee. Both indoor and outdoor devices. A Hue, HA, and ST hubs. A 2 satellite Orbi network over 3 floors. 3 Amazon Echos. A Ring doorbell and 4 camera setup not integrated into HE but integrated with HA. 6 wired IP camerasand 1 wireless IP cameras running on a PC with Blue Iris.
Prior to switching to Room Lighting I would see Motion Lighting work 95% of the time. Mostly failed because of Amazon commands.
Not saying it is not a good app, just didn't work well for me.
No - I also moved off RL for the most part and build rules instead. I always struggled with the means to activate/means to disable orders of execution etc. My environment is mode oriented, and I would get lost in the act/state/type/off area as well. I do use it for really generic setups tho.
I briefly tried Room Lighting, but honestly, it's just far more straight forward to obtain the results I want in Rule Machine.
I just create lighting scenes as rule Machine apps without any triggers. Sometimes I get fancy and use Private Boolean to determine if the scene is activated or not so I can use one rule with an IF to control both on and off actions.
Then I'll create another rule to trigger it. This way I can activate/deactivate the scene from multiple paths with really simple rules. Like activate on motion, deactivate on button press, or physical switch, or presence, etc.
RL config seems very different to me at first. Several times I have tried to naively do something and it didn't work or I couldn't figure out how so gave up and used RM. Later, I'd read a post and catch a snippet of someone's config or catch a piece of advice and I'd go back and try again and lo and behold it works AND it's easier than RM. I won't speak for everyone but I know I haven't fully read the docs nor played with it extensively so that's on me but I'm really happy with it so far.
I dont get what is so complicated? For me it is easier than rule machine for lighting. But some things are easier with RM vs RL . A couple of simple examples...
Room Lighting is the best app on Hubitat! It can be a complex app. It potentially allows one to replace multiple Rule Machine rules with a single RL configuration. It's been around long enough that there are a lot of people who can help figure out issues.
The number one thing with Room Lighting, like all automation is to be clear about the use case and make it as simple as possible. Don't choose options that you don't need or understand. Don't create an automation that you can't explain in less than a minute to your SO.
The #1 thing to know about RL is that once you activate a RL app it thinks it is in charge of the devices. (This is actually the same as the older Motion app.) If you change the state of a device while the RL app is running it will not know of the change if it not configured correctly. That is often the cause of messages like 'not turning on, already on'.
Another big one is to understand 'Activate' and 'Off'. 'Activate' means starting the app. The app will follow the ACT settings in the table - turning a device on, off, or do nothing. 'Off' means ending the app and can mean turn the device off or do nothing.
Means to activate and turn off are all 'or' conditions. You have to configure the limiting options if you want to block some of the 'or's, which when turning off is typically motion sensors being active.
I almost always configure the 'Switches that determine lights are off' option. Sometimes it is a belt-and-suspenders approach and not totally necessary. It can make sure the RL app is ready to be activated again.
One big thing that IMO can cause confusion is around groups and scenes. I'd rather they be separate from the automation app. But users can do that separation themselves.
Again, there are lots of people around to help troubleshoot issues.
Sure, took me a while to get it. The wording doesn't confuse me now but it did at first. The descriptions are a bit terse and could be made more explicit, e.g. a heading could read "Means to Activate this automation" instead of "Means to Activate Lights", which may not activate any lights, or anything - in fact I have many RL instances just to turn off lights left on. "Means to turn Off" can also be confusing (doesn't necessarily turn anything off, but turns off the automation until it activates again).
Thanks @jshimota. After reading your post I went straight to Rule Manager and created the lighting for the room that I wanted. Before, I started trying to set back up Motion Lighting but I think RM is a much better solution for me.
So far all is working good. Amazing the feeling you get when it works after so long that "I" put up with it not. Again, not blaming RL, this is not a slam on Room Lighting.
I tried RL. I think my issues stemmed from capture and restore which I suspect RL uses. Even in my own rules captures/restore was unpredictable. I have dimmer levels set in Hub Variabls based on modes and I use those variables to restore dimmers after Motion is no longer detected after a WAIT for conditions. Works 98% of the time. I still have the outlier situation that Iām troubleshooting.
I use RL for everything that it can do, works great here, no issues with it. I was a major beta tester for it when it was about to come out. You do some pretty complex stuff with RL that would take a VERY complicated rule to make. Could it be done in RM, probably, would it be pretty or easy, heck no.
I wouldn't say I have given up on it, but tis not as beneficial as I had hoped it would be. everytime i try and use it i end up doing trial and error for several days to get things ironed out. There have been time i started in Room lighting and bagged it half way through to use Rule Machine or Simple automation.
Could you expand on how "Switches that determine lights are off" is used in this context?
My RL rules tend to control lights, triggered by contact or motion sensors, but the same lights are also controlled by physical toggle switches (with the actual controller device in the backbox behind the switch) which can also be managed via Alexa. They mostly work, but there have been occasional problems where RL seems to get out of sync with the lights' state and things stop turning on.
I generally resolve this by turning the lights on and off with Dashboard, or going nuclear and setting the "Force" option in the rule, but of course neither of these really address any underlying problem(s).
The option you mention sounds like it might, though...
A couple of things to do that frequently are the same, but may be different depending on the variety of sensors and switches and lights involved:
in means to turn off include the switch.
in switches that determine lights off add the lights. Both of these options reset the Room Lighting app to its off state and then make the app ready to re-activate. One thing to note is motion sensors have a hardware timeout. The sensors will have to go through their timeout period before the app will re-activate from motion.
I've made sure rules' "turn off" periods are comfortably longer than any hardware timeouts, ta. As far as means to turn off goes, there's no issue with the fact that the switch is already turning off the light, independently of the RL rule? And that the same switch is a toggle, so depending on the initial state of things could be turning on rather than off?
The only issue is hardware related. I have some sensors that take 10 minutes to time out. The RL app will not activate until that timer runs out even if the RL app is off and ready to activate.
That is correct. I don't use toggles, so I can't comment directly on how to include them in means to turn off. That may be one good use for including the lights in the switches that determine lights are off.
10 minutes is quite the timeout! I've got a mix of Sonoff (fixed at 2 minutes, IIRC) and Hues (adjustable, but generally set to 30s - 2m for mine).
Thanks - I'll give that a go and see how things turn out (probably adding "Switch turns on" entries too, given that each individual switch can do either).
