My first floor has been working great for years using “motion and mode lighting apps”. I later had my basement finished, but never got around to setting the motion sensor logic up. Can I leave the first floor using the legacy apps, and the basement using “Room Lighting” so I can spread the process out over a few weekends and learn Room Lighting a bit better before I get into the more complicated scenarios of the first floor?
My kids like turning the lights on/off themselves while they’re playing in the basement to pretend it’s night time and whatnot. I saw there are override capabilities to the Room Lighting timers, but I didn’t see anything that would trigger canceling the override on a timed basis (i.e. resetting itself every night at 3am). Is that as simple as making a virtual button set to undo the override, and then making a time-triggered Simple Automation rule that triggers every night that hits said virtual button?
I remember there was a reason at the time I now cannot remember, but when I originally configured my first floor, I did so such that none of the scenes could be turned off. Instead, they’d trigger a “sleep” scene that turned off all the lights. Unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t look like Room Lighting supports activating a scene at an “off” event such that to leverage Room Lighting on the first floor I need to change my scenes to support being turned off, and unwind/rethink any of my Rule Machine apps that trigger that sleep mode. That sound right?
I use 3 motion sensors for my first floor as it’s an open floor plan with multiple entrances. Is there any pro/con to using the distinct Zone Motion Controllers app any longer, considering it looks like Room Lighting effectively bakes that in? I feel like Zone Motion Controllers would randomly get wonky every 3-6mo anyway.
Thanks! Hubitat is by far the best smart home system out there!
Yes, there is no reason to ever change from the "legacy" apps if you don't want to. They will keep working; they are just not available for new installations, with Room Lighting being the suggested replacement. (Though if the automation is sufficiently simple, Basic Rule might even be able to do it.)
That would work, unless there is something built-in that I can't think of (there are a million options, and this is quite likely ). But there definitely is an option to cancel the override on mode change, so if your modes change overnight or early in the morning and that's ultimately what you want, that should work, too.
If you think Zone Motion Controllers is doing something odd, I'd enable logging for the app and see what it says. However, Room Lighting does let you use multiple sensors directly (including for different purposes--some can not Activate but prevent Turn Off, for example, carrying over the similar feature in Motion Lighting). So, if that was your only use for ZMC, you don't need it here.
For the scenes, I'm not sure I fully understand what's going on there, but I can think of two things if they help. First, you can use the "Preset Off" option to set lights to specific settings rather than necessarily turning them off. Second, you can continue to use Groups and Scenes if they do what you need (they were un-retired, though RL should also be able to handle anything they did).
Room Lighting also lets you import existing Mode and Motion Lighting (and Groups and Scenes) instances, so if you want to see how an identical automation can be created in RL based on one of these, that is something you can also do--regardless of whether you end up using the RL automation or stick to what you had.
Did not realize that - my logic is heavily reliant on modes, so that’s much easier, thanks!
Yup - night lights going on and monitoring to see if no motion for 30min during the day is the only use - and use the same simple 3 sensor zone.
So the imported instances actually didn’t function correctly for me. I think because I have my legacy ones all triggering the “sleep” scene to turn all the lights off, which Room Motion doesn’t appear to support, rather than turning off the scene that turned the lights on, which I have disabled as I believe that was the part causing issues.
I’ll swing back around to update this eventually if I hit the logic again that caused me to take that approach in the first place. I thought there was a logic issue, but it may have simply been my thinking that, “a scene would be any collection of light settings - including them all being off.” Rather than “a scene is a collection of lights’ settings where at least one is on, and the rest are off - but not that all are off” that appears to be the more common use.
). But there definitely is an option to cancel the override on mode change, so if your modes change overnight or early in the morning and that's ultimately what you want, that should work, too.
