Currently I am using rule machine to automatically turn on my porch light when motion is triggered by my Hue motion sensor, and thanks to the help of the community, I was able to set a global variable now so when I physically turn the switch on/off it will set the variable accordingly and then the rule to control my porch light will not fire as long as the porch light has been turned on physically, so that when I'm out on the porch working the light will not constantly turn off on me! LOL
The next thing I was curious to see if it is possible to do is to pause the integration with IFTTT and SharpTools, because I'm using those to notify when motion is triggered and things like that, so while I'm able to now control the lighting, I still get messages every time motion is detected, and I would like to disable that. It also tells my camera to take a video each time as well, and that is being controlled by those integrations, so I would like to somehow pause them, or maybe can I pause/disable the Hue motion sensor instead during those times?
If anyone has any thoughts on how this might be accomplished, that would be awesome!
Here is my rule that I have created to control a global variable, and then in my porch rule I have that variable as a condition. You could also just have it pause a rule instead of change a variable as I did, so there are several ways this could be done.
Thanks for that information and I will check that out.
You are right that it seems it is possible to disable various applications in the UI so does anyone know how to disable/enable applications via rules or another mechanism?
Can you post your SharpTools rule for notification? I am wondering if you can add the "Porch Light Switch physical on" as the If_Condition to achieve what you want. Or you can create a virtual switch for what you are doing with the variable. SharpTools cannot see the HE variable, but the virtual switch status, so you can use that virtual switch in the If_condition to determine if it should send you a notification.
Since I'm triggering my camera with IFTTT and sending messages via SharpTools, they are not able to see my global variable, nor can they access the rules, but you did provide an interesting solution that I think just might work, where if I can control a virtual switch and share that to both integrations, then maybe I can conditionally trigger those based on the switch as well. That sounds promising and an excellent idea, so I'm going to give that a shot and see how that works! Thanks for that suggestion!!!
Hmmm, so it looks like there is no easy way to create multiple condition apps with IFTTT, so is there a way to disable a device instead of an integration, so that I could pause or disable my motion sensor, and in that way I could use my single condition IFTTT applet as is? Not sure if this is possible either, but I thought it cannot hurt to ask!
Yes, IFTTT is fairly limited for multi condition use case. You can still achieve this by using whatever you had before with one RM rule setting variable based on the physical switch and 2nd rule turning on the light when motion is triggered and the variable is False, but just add a virtual switch to the 2nd rule and turn it on when the light is turned on in the 2nd rule. In the VS, set it to auto off after 1 sec. So now you can just use this VS to trigger IFTTT and SharpTools rule because it is only turned on based on the condition you desired.
Thanks James and I had thought of that tonight when I was playing around with things, and so I have already done basically what you mentioned, where I have a rule that pausing the rule for the lights, and then setting a global variable, and then another rule turns on the virtual switch to indicate motion and then have it delaying turning off after 30 seconds. I'm in the middle of testing all of this at the moment to see if this is going to work, but thus far it seems to be working. Your suggestion is spot on and I believe this is going to work so that I just expose that one switch to my integrations and all of the conditions are just handled within the hub. Thanks once again for your insightful help!
