I'm using motion lighting in one of my rooms. It manages sengled smart bulbs. Is there a way that if I use the echo to turn off the lamps when my motion turns it on, that they remain turned off through that command for a certain period of time? TIA.
Not completely within Motion Lighting. It does have a feature that will prevent the app from turning the lights on if they were turned off manually. So in you scenario, using that option, Echo turns them off so they won't turn on again -- until something other than the app turns them on. So the question becomes how to turn them on again, which clears this state out of not being turned on by the app. So, given your mention of time, I don't think this option is the one you want.
Another way to disable turning the lights on is with a switch or a Hub variable. Perhaps you could have an RM rule that is triggered at the same time as Echo turning off these lights. That rule in turn could set the switch or variable to disable Motion Lighting from turning on the lights, and then flip that back after the certain period of time. How to trigger that rule?
I can think of two ways to do this:
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Create a virtual device, a switch, and give it the name you want to use with Echo. Include this switch instead of the one controlled by Motion Lighting into the Alexa Skill. When you tell Alexa to turn off that switch, that triggers the rule described above. The rule turns off the real switch being controlled by Motion Lighting, and acts as thee disable switch for Motion Lighting, then the rule starts starts the timer. When the timer is done, it turns the virtual switch back on, thus re-enabling Motion Lighting.
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Similar to the above, you create a virtual switch and put it into Alexa Skill (with whatever name). It and the real switch are combined into an Alexa Group. It would be that Group that you "turn off", and when turned off, both switches turn off -- the real one and the virtual one. The virtual one fires the rule, etc., just as above.
The reason you need the extra switch for this is because you don't want this rule triggered every time the controlled light turns off, only when Echo turns it off. So the virtual switch is used only for that aspect of triggering the rule that disables Motion Lighting for x minutes. In both cases, Echo is actually going to 'turn off' a stand-in for the real switch. The 'stand-in- could have the same name if you are careful about how you set this up, and keep straight which is which.
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