Hello all, Wink refugee here, got my HE in the mail yesterday. After some (HE blameless) LAN tussling, I got the HE fired-up and paired easily with most of my devices. I set-up dashboards for both my wife and I, installed the built in automation apps and Alexa skill, so far so good. Where Iām struggling is with the automations. I have a couple that worked well in Wink, that are pretty critical path for the WAF, that Iām having difficulty replicating. At the heart of this post is asking for help with these two automations, but on a higher level Iām really asking about best practices, because I know there is more than one way to go about these.
Theyāre both basically morning/bedtime routines. In the morning my wife sleepily toggles a dumb wall switch with a single GE Link bulb attached. Wink would see the bulb turn on, and power up a couple other lights and an outlet. My issue seems to be in duplicating the trigger. I tried simple automations, rule machine, and Alexa routines to try and duplicate this. Alexa wouldnāt give the option of the bulb turning on as a trigger. Simple automations wouldnāt let you trigger the outlet, and I thought I had it set up right in rule machine, but when I toggled the switch to test it, nothing happened, and then I found the Ge link completely unresponsive and had to factory reset and re-pair it. š¤·š»
The other is bedtime; basically turn everything off, lock the door, wait a few sec. and turn the master bedroom lamp on low. I made an Alexa routine for this, it worked middlingly well, but I think it should really be an HE automation. I set it up in RM with ānight modeā as the trigger, it was snappy and impressive, but not sure how to make it an Alexa command. I tried playing around with virtual buttons, but I got lost. I also think Iām making a mistake in that āall offā should be itās own command, or group, or scene, so it can be invoked in more than one place? Wink had a prebuilt āall offā that could be called in ārobotsā and responded to Alexa commands. Additionally, this bedtime automation could be triggered by the living room lights turning off (after a set time in the evening) at the Lutron switch (pro bridge is in the mail), which is functionality Iād like to preserve.
I have by no means given up on figuring this out myself, but the amount of time Iāve spent ignoring the toddler (and still not gotten things running just-so) is starting to frustrate the mrs, and Iād like to start out with a solid best-practices foundation to build on in the future. Any insights on what the right direction is, or pitfalls, would be much appreciated.
