I've been playing with the motion lighting app more recently, and had used the Dont' turn on if manually turned off option on a couple of my rooms / lighting rules. Now, however, I don't want that behavior anymore, and have unchecked the option. The lights still refuse to turn on when motion occurs, even if I manually turn the lights on to try to reset the state.
I enabled logging for that motion lighting app, and see that it is still affecting it:
Thanks! And might I add a feature request to be able to reset this disable on manual on/off setting, on selected mode changes or some criteria? It's kind of like the 0:01 left on the microwave, I don't need it to remember that I turned the light off 3 days ago, and be confused when the motion doesn't turn the light on when I walk into the room at a later date. It'd be nice to have some feature exposed, whether within the motion lighting app itself, or some setting available to rule machine or something to be able to reset this at certain points.
The problem with this is adding more complexity in an already fairly complex app. It seems simple enough that if the lights don't come on when you expect them to, just turn them on. Turning them on clears the state.
I was excited when I saw this feature on the latest release as it sounds very useful. However, I had the same issue with the Don't turn on if manually turned off option. I ended up deleting the motion lighting app and recreating to clear it.
Reason I deleted is for this same reason. I didn't like that there was no way of clearing the "Don't turn on" state besides manually turning on (and actually I didn't have much luck with that because if you manually turn on, you have to manually turn off and then end up in same state).
I would definitely like this feature a lot if the state could be cleared on mode change or maybe in RM. As it is now, it's not very usable.
The problem I see with this is how to select when it should clear. If it were as simple as clear on next mode change, that would be easy to do. But would that work for you? Would it work for anyone else? It wouldn't work to turn this "when to clear it" into a complex set of choices.
I think a clear on next mode change would be perfect. The way I see the use case is: you want the light off for a short period of time in a room where you normally have the light come on.
But it's only a temporary need (otherwise you wouldn't have the motion lighting condition to begin with).
In my opinion it would be a rare condition to have this temporary off hold need to be carried over to the next mode, especially not the next day.
The 'turn on to clear' concept makes sense to me too if that would work. Problem is, how do you get the light to go back off after you turn on manually? Should it continue to follow the motion lighting app and turn off after the motion stop delay?
I have to disagree on the clear on next mode change as being desired effect. If I turn the light off manually, and fall asleep on the couch, I don't want it to start coming on at 5:30am when Morning mode kicks on. I'd prefer to reset all the manual on/off controls when changing to Away mode, as that would work best for my use case (expecting everything to work like normal when coming back to the house)
Simply providing a one-or-more mode selection to clear the bit would be 95% of the way there for most people, I'd think.
This is how it works now. When you turn it on manually, it clears that state. Motion begins to work again. You'd have to trip the motion for it to then turn off automatically after turning it on manually. So for a light switch outside a room, you have to go into the room after turning it back on.
Ok, so in my experience with it, this didn't really work for an intuitive real world situation. The off state wouldn't get cleared, probably because of the following situation now that I'm understanding it better:
You go in a room, light turns on by motion app.
You turn off light manually, causing a freeze to motion app.
You go in room or move to light switch(triggering motion) and then hit light switch to turn on light (clearing state). But, because you turned light on manually after motion was already active, the motion lighting app isn't going to turn the light off.
Then 30 minutes later someone(wife) sees the light is still on and they turn off manually (not thinking about HE requirements) again (and restart the process).
that'll be a good start, but I can see some boundary cases where it could use the extra configurability of defining which mode changes should be triggered on
I've thought about this before too and don't use it for that reason. It could get complicated. My only real thought was to allow the user to choose a switch to clear it. A "clear with switch: " I get that you would need to create a virtual switch dedicated to this...but then the user could pretty much clear it whenever and however they wanted.
This isn't true. I just tested this and it works as expected. That is, if the lights are turned on manually, and there is motion, the don't-turn-on state is cleared, and the lights turn off from motion inactive.
Update: There is no bug with this feature. It works as expected.
This feature, "Clear on next mode change", will be in the next release. We will see how this goes, and whether or not there is a real need for further means of clearing the "Don't turn on if turned off manually" condition.
The original use case that prompted the addition of the "Don't turn on if turned off manually" feature was a movie watching room. When you want to watch a movie you turn the lights off and by doing so disable motion turning them on again. For that use case, the mode change feature may be ok. It wouldn't be ok if the mode were to change in the middle of the movie, as then the lights would come on from motion.
We can revisit this subject again...
But I should reiterate: Turning the lights on manually does reset Motion Lighting back to operating normally. For the lights to turn back off after doing so, motion is needed since motion-inactive is the means for the lights turning off automatically.
So I have been running release 2.1.2.115 for the last week or so.
Unfortunately, there is still some issue with the 'don't turn on if manually turned off' condition not clearing.
I have about 10 motion lighting apps, 3 of them I turned on this option after the latest update and also enabled the 'clear on mode change' feature that was added. On all 3 of the apps I cannot get the condition to clear either by mode change OR by manually turning on the light (with motion in room to activate motion-inactive shutoff). The light will turn off after the time out, but looking at the logs, once I re activate motion, I still get the log that says: "Not turning on: turned off manually" and the light does not turn on.
I tested this out on multiple lights over a few days and every single time it does not work. Even through multiple mode changes it never clears. I have now turned off the option completely and it still won't clear. I'm rebooting my hub now to at least hopefully clear the state.
The light/motion sensor combos I am using are as follows(if it helps):
Zooz Zen27 light/goControl motion
GE switch/motion sensor in one unit
GE switch/zooz motion
Let me know if there's any troubleshooting or logs that would help debug the issue.
