As i was literally starting to write this....man I need help. Stuff is happening in the house that just isn't making sense. At this point I can ONLY attribute this to Motion Lighting.
First problem. I have a very simple motion lighting rule for "Night Lights". Essentially in Night mode (our sleeping mode) if any motion sensor in the list goes active I want a bunch of lights to come on through the house at a very low level. Allowing someone to walk through the house (me) without tripping on something. Generally because my daughter woke up and her room is across the house and up the stairs.
Last night this exact scenario happened. The rule is set to go off after 8 minutes. Well after putting her back to bed I went into the upstairs bathroom. While in the bathroom the light in the bathroom (which is one of the ones triggered) went off briefly and back on(pretty sure this was the 8min). Not sure why because I was moving in there the whole time. When I left the bathroom all the other lights in the house were off. Now the motion sensor in that bathroom is part of the rule. Along with a ton of other sensors. As I walked back through the house to my bedroom....in complete darkness....honestly...disappointed that something this simple wasn't working. Mode was Night. (confirmed that)
Also can someone confirm. Does that "Off" option override rules for the entire day even when the rule didn't turn them on?
Does this work just like RM since I have this one motion lighting rule does that mean when there is no motion for 8 minutes on any of those sensor this Motion Lighting rule will turn off all those lights regardless of what turned them on?
If so I'm going to completely have to rethink a bunch of things. I feel like my HE setup is starting to get complicated and I'm going to need a piece of paper to write down all these rules and settings.
For those of you that have multiple things that can turn on lights (motion, modes, times of day) how do you handle turning them OFF. It seems that if I use FALSE for anything then pretty much those lights are going off only based on that rule. So it seems that I pretty much only want lights to turn on with rules under "true" and need maybe multiple rules for just turning off lights based on things being true.
One of my thoughts was to create a rule that turns off a Virtual Switch for a light if ALL of the rules that manage turning on that light are false. Then a rule to turn off the light if that virtual switch goes off. But gosh that seems really illogical and complicated.
Either that or I just need to bite the bullet and head back to WebCore. Currently everyone in the house thinks I'm crazy because it's been a few weeks now and lights go off and everyone looks at me like "why did that happen" and I just shrug. They've been used to 2 years of things working like clockwork..and I'm struggling to get it to work.
The answer to a question like this lies in the logs. Any one of those motion sensors would keep the lights on until 8 minutes after the last one goes inactive. Can you look at the past logs and see when the motion sensors went inactive, and when the lights turned off? It's not possible to tell from your description the details needed to understand what happened.
I seem to have about a 20 min window for that correct? AKA how long I can see logs in "Past Logs" unless there is another way. I can do into each device and see device logs longer than that...but I can't for rules or Motion Rules.
This is what I know. Using the rule above. While in the bathroom the light turned off and immediately back on. When I left the bathroom all the other lights in the house were off. It was 5am. I just put my daughter back to bed. Sitting down to figure this out wasn't on my hit list. And of course when I woke back up I looked into it. I have no idea how to look at a log for a Motion Rule. It would be nice if that feature existed. I've converted my rules to RM until I can understand how this works or just leave them there.
Device Logs:
Light was turned on at: 4:52:33
Light was turned off at: 5:03:58
Light was turned on at: 5:03:59
Light was turned off at 5:19:25
According to all that...the last motion active event prior to the lights going out was 05:00. Light went out at 5:03:58. So just under 4 min. The rule is set to timeout at 8min.
This isn't the only case where I've seen things like this and I feel like my life for the last 2 weeks has just been attempting to figure out what's going on. Bobby was able to help me with some other really wierd stuff (delays mostly) going on that was related to securely joined devices...but I'm still struggling to get back to where I was...and I find myself more and more using otherHub to push things back to ST to make things work reliably. I don't WANT to do that. I would really like to have everything working here.
EDIT: the reason I didn't post the screen shot of the light logs is that it looks like this:
No idea what's causing that. (It's a hue light connected to a hue bridge). So is there a way to tell from the logs what's causing the log entry? Physical event (Hue hub going crazy) or something in HE polling or setting it?
I have 200+ devices and about 7 hours of past logs. So maybe you have something flooding the logs?
Unfortunately, we don't have a way to nail down what happened with your situation last night. The next release will have optional logging in Motion Lighting, which might help pinpoint a cause. Were I in your shoes, I would do some testing other than in the middle of the night to see if each device is behaving as expected, and if what happened can be reproduced.
@jrfarrar perhaps you can make a simple change to your Motion Lighting Rule to use "day" instead of night for testing (and gathering logs.) It would be nice to know the logic was right, independent of Mode.
[ disclamer: I have never used Motion Lighting. I added it to my second hub in the hope of learning the other apps that I don't use any minute now I'll get back to that project.. ok, maybe not even this week ]
So that's interesting. Just looking at them I don't see anything that looks like "flooding" average house with 3 kids and 2 adults right now. Motion sensors and lights.
New project change all device drivers to properly use "log.debug" with a parameters switch...yay
FYI @ericm I just did this for the NZW31 it now reports with "info" for ON/OFF/Level commands. Unless of course you turn debug logging on.
I have similar functionality via two Rules in RM. 3 motion sensors in one Rule for going up or down the stairs, then another Rule, with 2 motion sensors for the kitchen. Meaning: I think I know what you're aiming for, just can't help with Motion Lighting app.
any minute now I'll get back to that project.. ok, maybe not even this week 
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it now reports with "info" for ON/OFF/Level commands. Unless of course you turn debug logging on.
