I'm trying to set up a fairly straightforward automation between a "primary" switch and a "secondary" switch. [But there's more context at the end.]
- By default, they are "paired" - pressing the button on the primary will switch the secondary to match.
- pressing the button (once) on the secondary will unpair them, so the primary will no longer affect the secondary.
- pressing the button (again) on the secondary will pair them again, so from then on pressing the primary will control the secondary.
However, I can't figure out how to distinguish when the secondary changes state due to the primary being pressed vs. when it changes state due to it being pressed directly.
Here's the naive setup.
The primary rules them all:
The secondary throws the ring in the fire:
The simple thing to do would be to introduce another "guard" variable to the primary rule, indicating that it is running. However, that trips over some immediate race conditions (the guard typically gets unset before the secondary switch finishes changing), so I have to add a delay for unsetting it. Which, of course, is vulnerable to all kinds of real-world race conditions, including the primary getting pressed again, the secondary actually getting pressed while the guard is waiting, etc.
And it's actually more complicated than that. This test bed is just to isolate the problem. What I'm really trying to do is set up a fairly complicated rule, which will slowly raise a dimmer (among other things), and there are other switches involved - so the race conditions get more and more complicated.
I think what I really need is for the "unpair" rule to know whether the switch is changing because somebody actually hit the button, or because a rule told it to. It seems to me that should be a basic property of the triggers, but I can't find anything that lets me figure it out. Am I missing something?
Help?