Disable Motion Sensors when switched on manually

💡 Lighting Room Lighting
1

I am using NYCE motion sensors to trigger Caseta dimmers and hue bulbs. I'm also controlling this lighting with Picos so that everything can be triggered based on hub mode.

I was working on this about 3 years ago, trying to trigger scenes and running into a lot of problems when life happened. When I finally got back to this 3+ years later (now), I was thrilled to see all the "recent" changes including the Room Lighting app.

When setting up the automations, I was looking for a setting to Disable Motion Sensors when switched on manually because this is the key functionality I wanted. I only saw a similar setting (well documented) for disabling turning lights off after a dimmer change.

Anyway, I was trying to figure this out with ChatGPT and thinking that I was going to have to create 2 instances of each room since the disable options looked to be global.

Anyway, after testing it seems like this is already how the app is currently functioning. I'm uploading an image here. Can somewhat tell me what setting in the app is causing this behavior or if there is just some rule that is built in by default? I want to understand how this would affect the expected behavior of any other changes that I make.

BTW - Is there a setting that would allow me to long press the buttom pico button to turn off the lights and disable motion sensors? This confuses me about the app, because similarly it seems like the Activation and off options are global which would disable the pico, when de-activating the motion sensor, which wouldn't make any sense. What am I missing?

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2

Have you considered writing a rule in rule machine to where when you long press the pico remote that it sends another lights on command and pauses your room lighting rule. Then you can set that same rule to unpause by another type press, certain time, elapsed time, etc which will then allow the room lighting to run as normal and let your motion sensors take over again.

I do this with Third Reality buttons but I use rule machine for my lighting instead of room lighting. I push the button. Rule is paused. I hold the button, rule resumes and the original rule machine rule takes back over.

3

I use virtual switches for the room. When I manually set a light (on off, whatever) I turn the switch off. When Im ready for it to be back under motion activvation I turn the swtich on. As part of my good night return I have all of the switches toggled back to on so everything is reset for the next day. 98% of the time works pretty slick exactly as intended. In this screen shot, the virtual switch is the Bedroom Bypass

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same instead of disabling i have a virtual switch which turns on and off only via physical presses of the light switch.. then i use that in my motion lighting rule to disable it when i physically want the light to stay on.

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