The motion app kinda sucks with scenes. About once a week my living room just doesn't come on in the evening. Check the logs and it says motion detected, not turning on, already on. Really? Cause it's freaking dark in here. Check the scene that should be activated and it's not activated so why does hubitat think it is? God this gets annoying. Don't bother telling me how to fix, I'll figure it out eventually. Just wanted to vent that I spend too much troubleshooting. This is basic stuff that should just work. I mean, it worked yesterday, and the day before. And before that.
Oh this is going to get exciting. It's sad that the JWST is consuming all the really good entertainment minutes... but this is a close second. I can barely wait for the next installment.
Whatever.
Feeling better now that you’ve vented?
We’ve all had our moments in automation hell @waffles
I do hope you’ve sorted out your problem.
Not really. I'm done here. This forum is no longer useful to me. I have other hobbies and its time to move on.
You just said you don’t want help.
??
Not sure what to say, and not sure if you want help or not?
Scenes and Motion Lighting should be working fine, and there don't appear to be many (or any?) recent reports of them not working from what I can see on the forums.
Not sure why you are getting the "not turning on, already on" message if none are truly on. Did you try changing any of the settings in either Scenes (optimization for example) or Motion Lighting (turn on if already on) to see if anything made a difference?
With the 1 motion rule that I use scenes in, I first turn on the group I created for this, then set the scene per mode. It always works perfectly and I haven’t touched it in at least a year, but there was obviously a reason I added the group to turn on
@waffles there are people here who would really like to help you. Would you take a bit to share some more details?
I know you have had other issues since you started working with HE in April, and the community has been there to help.
We have all had a time or two (3,4…) when we thought it was a lost cause. (I fought my iBlinds forever. ). A little breathing room, a bit of research, a lot of friendly advice from the community and the problem get solved. Unfortunately it isn’t always a quick fix.
Don’t give up on the community. It is what makes this great piece of hardware amazing.
Waffles won't be interested in what I have to say but the first thing I thought of is are the lights directly connected to the HE hub or are they via Hue or the cloud or something. Cos I know my Hubitat doesn't always agree with what state my Hue lights are in, especially when I am using Hue scenes. I accept that though and try to automate in a way so that it doesn't matter. For example I might introduce a virtual switch with automatic turn-off so the motion would trigger the switch which in turn would turn on the lights - whether or not hubitat or the motion app thought they were already on.
If scenes are not working for you, find another way to do what you want.
I have never used scenes, or even the rule machine. I do everything using basic rules. Sometimes it might take two separate rules to do something in basic rules that I might have been able to do with one in rule machine, but simple (or basic) rules are easier to set up and easier to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
As an example, I have the lights in the master bath set to come on when a motion detector is triggered, but I do not want the lights to come on between the hours of 10:00 pm and 6:00 am when I am normally in bed. If I have to go to the bathroom during the night, I do not want the lights to come on and blind me. I have a 1 watt night light to provide adequate light for that situation. It would be easy to control your living room lights to function only between sunset and sunrise and only when a motion detector indicates the room is occupied.
Also, what device are you using to control your living room lighting that is not completely reliable. I am using Lutron Caseta light switches, dimmers, and dimmer plugs throughout my home. They are rock solid. Lights come on and turn off when they are supposed to no matter whether they are triggered by a motion sensor, contact sensor, time of day or sunrise/sunset times. The issue you are having might not be due to Hubitat, but to the devices and to the RF mesh that allows them to communicate with Hubitat.