Frustrating motion lighting debugging

spud · October 16, 2018, 7:09pm

I have a simple Motion Lighting app for my office: a ZooZ 4-in-1 sensor tests for motion, and turns on the office lights (varying dimness by mode). It also sets a virtual switch "Office occupied" for use in other apps.

There are 2 Ecobee sensors in the office as well, and I set them up as "Additional Sensors" (can you/should you set up the trigger sensor itself as an "additional sensor" or is that clearly redundant?)

That's it. You can see the configuration below.

I'm currently sitting in my office, with no lights on. The logs show my ZooZ going from Active to Inactive as I alternately sit and move, but no lights are triggered. I can't figure out why. A dashboard indicating office motion is properly triggered.

What else could be preventing my lights from going on?

Bonus question: How exactly are Lux measured? My ZooZ reports "53lux" in a pretty naturally bright office, but one of the Hubitat video tutorials is clearly using a 1-1000 scale. How does Hubitat expect me to input values? (And, side note, the language for doing so is weird in the UI: First it says "Turn on only if Lux is less than this value," but the next configuration screen reads "Only if lux exceeds a level")

But man, coming from Vera rather than SmartThings, I'm loving all this trigger/rule making power...

bobbles · October 16, 2018, 7:18pm

How about just defining all 3 in your motion sensor field. Then any active will work.
I always start off with simple rules and then gradually build them up. You have a lot going on at the moment.

mchouse · October 16, 2018, 8:55pm

I wouldn't recommend including the ecobee sensors because they don't report motion, they report presence, and they don't report it in real time.

I'm having the opposite problem with one of the Zooz sensors. I can't get the lights to turn off! I think it's because the sensor is also reporting temp and lux. It seems like it's triggering lights whenever ANY of the values change, not just for motion.

bobbles · October 16, 2018, 8:57pm

Haven't got these personally so didn't know they do not report motion. No point in having them in the additional sensors field then as that is why you have defined them isn't it @spud

doug · October 16, 2018, 9:02pm

Zooz is 0 to 100 for illuminance I believe representing a percentage of their perceptible lux. Most sensors report actual lux measurement. They suck for lux measurement.

bravenel · October 16, 2018, 9:03pm

Could you show a screenshot of the app detail page for this app? Circled i to the right of the app name in Apps List. Take a screenshot of the lower half, showing Subscriptions and State.

spud · October 16, 2018, 9:04pm

Well, the sensors do report motion to the Ecobee, so I figured they might also report it to Hubitat as well. Nonetheless, with or without them, my lighting still isn't being triggered.

spud · October 16, 2018, 9:23pm

Including here. I was watching those during debugging, too, and the motion status was reporting correctly there, and syncStatus was "Synced" then too.

So here's another thought, partially related to my earlier question about luminance values. I initially set up this Motion Lighting instance to trigger only if the Lux value < N. And that's where my question came in about how to correctly use "N". 1 to 100, like the sensor reports to me, or 1 to 1000, as Lux is usually metered.

At some point, I may have entered something like "70" (bright on the first scale, very dark on the other!), but in the course of debugging, I took out the lux restriction. Is it possible that it's still using that value, although I disabled it (I noticed that Hubitat retains previous values even when toggling functionality on/off and saving).

I bring this up because 30 minutes ago, after being out of the office for a bit, I walked in the office, and the motion triggered the lights. Here are the logs:

dev:972018-10-16 16:27:25.906 info Office Occupied was turned on
dev:242018-10-16 16:27:25.843 info Group Office level set to 80%
dev:1072018-10-16 16:27:25.716 info Office Sensor: motion is active

and 15 minutes later (16:42), after I left the office again, it shut off (following the rule exactly).

But then, at 16:55, I triggered motion again...but no lights.

dev:1072018-10-16 16:55:12.546 info Office Sensor: motion is active
dev:1072018-10-16 16:55:03.276 info Office Sensor: motion is active
dev:1072018-10-16 16:55:03.049 info Office Sensor: motion is active

...and given my rules described in the original post, it should have triggered lights again. The only thing I can imagine was different was the office lux reading (and time, of course, but there were no mode changes or any other virtual switch changes).

Thoughts? Ways to debug further?

spud · October 16, 2018, 9:28pm

D'oh! Reading too quickly for my own good.

Capturing app detail now, not device. Sorries! Never knew this magic details page was there!

spud · October 16, 2018, 9:37pm

And some more potentially relevant stuff. Glancing over the app details page, I noticed some stuff like "levelSteffi Night". I originally had a mode called "Steffi Night" -- meaning she was asleep but I wasn't, so something between Evening and Night. I later renamed it "Pre-night" which is reflected in the dimmerModes, but there is no "LevelPre-night" as I would expect.

I have reselected and reset the modes and delays in the Motion Lighting app, but they don't appear to affect the values in the app details.

This leads me to believe that if I entirely recreated the rule, I might have better results, but in the interest of troubleshooting a possible bug that you'd want to weed out eventually, I can keep trying to fix this rule!

bravenel · October 16, 2018, 10:54pm

The fact that the name doesn't change is expected. However, removing this and recreating it is a good idea. I'm not sure there is a bug. Haven't gotten to the bottom of why your light isn't coming on as you expect.