Yeah, saw your post about RL, shame.... Good to pass on the error to the dev's, though your rule is simple enough it may be a good exercise to go through the steps of creating it from scratch in RL, as much as it would have been nice to not need to do it... Up to you.... See where the debugging gets you...
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Okay, I re-created the automation in Room Lighting. It's working somewhat. It's not always turning on or off, I wonder if it's because my Inovelli Reds have never been the most reliable for me. Still playing around... I do like that I can customize the times per day (weekends later start).
Two things I'm curious about:
- If the lights are scheduled to turn off (I even see the scheduled job in the logs), then is it too late for a switch turned on to disable the lights from being turned off? Or is that switch status checked after the delay (1m) before turning off?
- What's the difference between "Limit Turning Off under these Conditions: Switch is on" vs. "Disable/Re-Enable Turning Off upon these Events: Switch is turned on/off"
Regarding flakiness of the lights even coming on with motion: here's where the logs indicate basically that motion was detected by the app but the light itself didn't have it's level set:
If it helps, here are all the details for the app:
I think "Act" unchecked for Nightime period is what I want?
I take back what I said about Inovelli flakiness -- I just re-enabled motion lighting and it is consistently working fine.
There was a conversation about this in the last couple of months, I'll see if I can find it. Essentially, the "Limit..." option allows you to stop turning off lights based on the state (or combined state I think) of a device or some value, whereas the "...upon these Events..." option allows you to control the turning off of the lights based on an event. So for example, if you have a virtual switch that is always on during the time where you don't want the lights to turn off, use the "Limit,,,," option, but if you have two very separate events that you want to control the turning off option, like the pressing of a button or a change in mode, then you could use the "... Events..." option.
Here it is....
Ah, fair enough, so Event with switch on/off is overkill and ostensibly the same as Limit, if the same switch. If you want distinct items, then Events are helpful.
Any ideas on the configuration and if something looks different from my Motion Lighting that would cause motion not to turn the lights on reliably?
Correct.
The second round of activation starting at 8:33pm does not include the setLevel log entry. Are you saying the first activation and turning off between 8:27pm and 8:29pm worked as you expected, then the second activation did not turn the lights on?
The config looks fine BTW, at a glance...
Looking again at your screenshot, the RL app seems to be reporting the lights as On currently, which could be either you needing to refresh the page, or the lights (switch) not reporting correctly. There is an option to force that, which you may want to use.
You may want one or both of these:
If you click through the screens the options are available here:
Oooh, I'll try that additional option. Thank you for the pointer!
Regarding the original issue, I manually copied the motion lighting app into a new one and it seems to be respecting the laundry switch to disable off now. Not sure that anything is different. I had mistakenly clicked "Use settings per mode?" on the original motion lighting app, and I don't see a way to go back to what I had, same settings for all modes. But I think my testing when I started this thread was before I switched that slider.
Are you saying the first activation and turning off between 8:27pm and 8:29pm worked as you expected, then the second activation did not turn the lights on?
Yep, exactly.
From testing with the new motion lighting app I created, it seems the disable-off switch is working regardless of whether I set that laundry switch to on before/during/after motion, which is what I want.
I do wish there were a way when the laundry switch is turned off (which I want to be 15 minutes after turning on, enough time to deal with the laundry) to evaluate if there is, at that time, any hallway motion, and if not to turn off the lights then. But I imagine that's not so standard and would require Rule Machine. And I don't want to build that...
Excellent!!
I had a similar requirement recently. Not the nicest solution in some ways, but what I did was setup a virtual motion sensor and add it to a Zone Motion Controller setup (a built-in HE App, you could use others if you wish). In your case when the switch turns off, setup a small rule to activate the virtual motion sensor. I also configured the sensor to have a short timeout, so soon after the switch is turned off, the trigger to turn off the lights in RL will kick in. It won't turn off the lights immediately, but will allow motion shortly after to keep the lights on.
That's clever. Naming conventions get so hard to remember all the various apps/devices you have to create to workaround things like this. But it's obviously better than nothing to be able to do it all.
I'm still testing RL to see if force on/off is all I need for it to work.
I did have a little side-project I was working on a while ago to develop an app that would allow grouping together Apps and Devices that are related in whatever way you decide. I have the same situation where the lighting for a room may involve various Apps and Devices, so it would be nice to group them all together in the one place.
I guess you can actually assign them all to rooms now... as you can tell this is my first time actually trying out rooms.
I set most things up 2 years ago and have only lightly tinkered since. Finally today, with the doors of the laundry room blocking the hallway motions sensors and resulting in the lights turning off one too many times, I finally decided to rectify that problem. Didn't expect it to take me this long 
Okay, Room Lighting works with the force flag! After adding that option, I also had to check the Force box in the lighting periods page for all periods, but yeah, now it seems to be working well, and respecting the laundry switch.
Now to try to make sense of how to re-check motion after 15 minutes based on what you shared above. Seems complicated but I'll try... what are all the pieces you used there?
- Virtual motion sensor with auto inactive set for 5 seconds
- Motion zone controller combining virtual motion sensor with regular (in your case bathroom motion sensor) with activity timeout set for 15 seconds
-
Basic Rule (probably, or Simple Automation, or other)Rule Machine rule that, in my case, says when laundry switch turns off, activate motion on virtual motion sensor - Add motion zone controller to Room Lighting instead of individual motion sensors??
Edited: to change #3 to Rule Machine since other apps can't forcibly trigger motion
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I think I just found a simpler way of doing what you suggested:
Do #1 and #3 as suggested, but no need for a motion zone controller, and then just add the virtual motion sensor to the "Means to Turn Off Lights" in Room Lighting. Then, 5 seconds after the laundry switch is turned off, when the virtual motion sensor gets turned off, the hallway lights are turned off 1 minute after all motion is inactive (virtual and non-virtual).
Here's what my Room Lighting looks like now (I had to enable "Activate even if already partially Activated" under "Other Activation Options" to get the lights to always get turned on reliably):
And it seems to be working pretty well!
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Good point, inactivity on the virtual motion sensor is all that is really needed, and making use of it in the RL setup (or something similar) rather than including it in the Zone Motion Controller setup makes more sense.... I might look at doing this myself. Though I do like the simplicity of use the Zone Motion setup in terms of a single reference in RL.... Hmmm... I'll have to think it over some more....
Sure, fair enough. I haven't messed with zone motion enough to think about whether I like it, but seemed easier not to add more things. And then I could also explicitly make sure that the virtual motion sensor wasn't turning on the hallway lights when it was activated, only causing the hallway lights off condition to be triggered.
Okay, I think final question, and this might indeed require zone motion or something else: how would I set it up so that the first motion of the day would require both motion sensors to be triggered in order to turn on the lights, and only after that would the lights turn on when just one sensor detects motion? Basically, if going to the bathroom across the hall in the morning, which only one sensor will pick up motion for, don't turn on the lights, regardless of time. If both sensors pick up motion or it happens more than once (or N times), then turn on the lights.
That sounds like a question beyond my cognitive power at this time of night.... 
You may want to look at the options in Zone Motion Controller, but I expect you could be right that it extends outside of that app.... You may need to look at options like Rule Machine and Hub Variables, etc.
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