So here is what I am trying to accomplish. I actually have two rooms in my house where I want to use motion lighting. With Smartthings and Webcore, I used a variable to me accomplish my goal, and it worked well, and it works ok with Hubitat as well. But, I’ve been trying to embrace the “official” apps for habitat just to get to know it better, and know what I can and cant do.
I feel like I’ve just done a poor job of explaining the goal and it works in my normal day to day routine.
I used my office in my example, but my kitchen is probably more understandable for most people.
I have two ceiling lights, both controlled by GE zwave dimmers. I have a motion sensor in the kitchen as well. 80% of the time I walk into the kitchen after dark, its just to grab something quickly. I’m in and out pretty quickly. I then walk back to another room, to enjoy what I just grabbed from the kitchen. But I can see the lights in the kitchen so I don’t want them to stay on for 1 minute after motion stops, I want them to turn off as soon as motion stops. This works just fine for me.
Sometimes, I want to spend more time in the kitchen, and maybe I stand still for a bit too long so the lights turn off, and then back on, etc. My fix with smartthings was to use a variable. I called it motion activated. So the logic was this.
Only if both lights were off, turn them on with motion, and then set variable Motion activated to true.
When motion becomes inactive, if the variable is true, then turn off the lights.
So if I wanted the lights to stay on and ignore my routine, I usually would either just manually turn on a light with the wall switch, or more likely use Alexa to turn on the “Kithcen Lights” right before I walked into the room. Then when I’m done, I use alexa to turn them off. With the lights off, the routine is now available to work again.
I liked this because I did not have to create another virtual switch or button to override the routine.
