Mode Manager and Google Home Agreement on "Home" vs "Away"

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1

Using Rule Machine, I do not see any way to get Hubitat to either sense or control the Google Home "Home" vs "Away" status.

This leads to telling a Google Home speaker "I'm leaving", and it puts the Google Home app into "away" mode, changes the thermostat to a low steady temperature, as the Google Nest thermostat obeys the Google Home "away" status, and even uses the Hubitat google-sdm-api app to turn the water supply off, a WaterCop under Hubitat control that thereby can be commanded from the Google Home app "away" routine.

All this is fine - but what about the locks, the garage door, and other things that I want the Hubitat to check on, and report on via that same speaker, for example "[back / front / side / garage ] door still unlocked, please lock as you leave" ?

The google home app seems to have no way to toggle the hubitat mode to "away", nor can I seem to set a global variable that would do the same thing, nor can I overtly set the hubitat's mode to "away" or "home", unless I could create some sort of virtual device to act as a sensor for Hubitat's own "mode manager".

I am not sure why this is "hard" - there are many homes with multiple systems, and such a basic thing as the underlying "mode" of the home would seem to be a very basic thing to make easy to integrate. What am I missing?

2

You mostly have the answer in your question. You can create a virtual "presence with switch" device. I have one called "Google Assistant Presence". In my Google home automations, under "Away", I have an action to turn the switch off. In the "Home" automation, I have an action to turn the switch on.

The virtual device is both a presence sensor and a switch, so you can use the presence attribute in Mode Manager to set your hub mode, or use Rule Machine to take whatever actions you want on the hub.

I actually don't currently use this to switch my hub mode. Instead I use Owntracks, the Hubitat app, and Google Home 'leaving' and 'arriving' routines to set presence using the "Combined Presence" community app. It's a bit more complicated, but it almost never fails with three different apps determining when I've departed or arrived.

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