I have the standard modes, plus an extra mode for morning.
In mode manager,
morning is set for Sunrise -4
day is disabled
Evening is set for sunset
Night is disabled
The -4 is to change modes shortly before anything else might trigger based on sunrise in rules.
I have a rule that states that if mode is morning, and there is motion in hallway, set mode to day. This enables us to have a variable sleep schedule and day mode is not triggered until we leave our room.
Recently, my alarm has been tripping when leaving the house (because I open the front door) and my front door keeps locking itself while I am working from home. Both are events that should only happen in night mode, which is when my HSM is auto-armed in armed-home state.
Looking into this I noticed my strange behavior is because my home never exits night mode.
Mode Manger does not have any events for changing the mode the Morning — just away, and evening.
Today I changed Mode Manger to set the mode to Morning at Sunrise - 60 in hopes this will do better.
I don't use Mode Manager myself anymore but maybe someone that does will see something I ended up just doing it with, initially a single rule in rule machine, and then several rules. It just ended up working better for me to do it that way given what I was trying to accomplish.
Yeah, I like to not overload the rule machine. I like having separate apps that are purpose built. I just deleted and reinstalled the app to see if that will help me out. Find out tomorrow morning. Haha
I ran into something similar. As I recall, the explanation was that, because I did not have a time set for my Home mode, but I did for Evening, when I returned home it didn't know what to set and so it set Evening. There must have been a change made that caused this, because the old Mode Manager worked fine for years.
Anyway... I ended up having presence for away and using only switches to change the other modes. The switches are toggled either via RM — when I'm doing other stuff for mode changes anyway — or by Alexa. (i.e. "Alexa, good morning."
THis is tangential to topic but similar - I have a virtual switch and mode periods that break the day into pieces.
If the switch is off, I turn this switch verbally when I go to bed via Alexa ala 'Alexa, good night'. The mode changes to 'sleeping'. The reciprocal is 'Alexa, I'm up'. this flips off the virtual switch, and mode manager triggered.
Recently it has begun to fail - only the Early Morning (at 6:15am).
the 'Set Mode at system startup based on time table' seems to be the problem.
a) what is 'time table'? I'm assuming it is the "Set Mode At Times" table at the top of the mode manager screen.
b) what is the 'not' implied if I do NOT have this switch turned on? I assume it is 'Not - Set mode at system startup'. Which means what? leave mode floating? mode is null until set?
c) Turning this switch off, mode is NOT being set every morning and is operating as I expect. The hub has not restarted or run 'system startup' that I am aware, it seems this routine is running every morning because of the hub doing maintenance (3am ish?) and this is not connected to System Startup but to System Daily Maintenance or whatever you'd like to call the 3am house cleaning.
I think the mode manager is flawed. In my opinion, away should be a state modifier for the modes. Modes should change however the user chooses — switch, button , time of day, manual, whatever, and it should happen regardless of away state. Then when you leave the mode changes to away, but internally, the mode should still be whatever mode the system had. While away, the mode should be able to change from day to evening to night, etc. and when I return, the mode switches from away to whatever the internal mode actually is.
Since it doesn’t work this way, I will be looking into doing something like this in rules, with a global variable, and once I work out the logic, I’ll probably create my own mode manager.
Now that I understand the mode manager properly, I was able to work around my issues.
@armand I agree with you - I noted this when I first came to HE a few years ago - home/away is not a mode, its a state! the way it's designed is too embedded now, and talking about it just gets everyones hackles up - so I just moved on. Another of my pet peeves is no trigger for mode manager. Right now I toggle away/home really fast so before Alexa notices and HSM switches but fast enough to force Mode Manager to run. works for the most part (sub - 2 seconds seems to be the required amount of time).
