I have all of my motion stuff built in RM, trying to convert over to ML.
I have a light that I want to turn on and set to 10% if motion is active, but only in Night mode. The motion sensor take 3.5 minutes to go inactive after motion stops. I want the light to turn back off when the motion sensor goes inactive, with no additional delay. If mode changes to Home while the motion sensor is active, I want the light to stay on regardless of motion.
Delay question (edit - I tested and my findings are in bold)...
If I don't put anything in the Delay field, will the light go off when motion goes inactive? no
Assuming I have to specify 0...where is the proper place to put the delay? Seems like there's two options, one under Lights to turn On, and another in the Options for Additional Sensors section...does it matter? no
Do they both do the same thing? appears that the answer is yes
What would happen if these two fields had different values? seems like the delay in the Lights to tun On section overrides the other one
Mode question: what happens if mode changes from Night to Home while the motion sensor is active? Does the Off command when motion goes inactive get skipped since mode is no longer Night?
I've just gone the other way. I could never quite get Motion Lighting to do exactly what I wanted or expected reliably . Especially in the areas of mode change or light already on it was inconsistant. In the end I moved mine over to RM. I found the consequences of actions a lot easier for me to follow there. I basically split each ML app it into 3 RM rules. Motion on, motion off and mode change. I set pause/resume of the "motion off" rule in the "motion on" rule to make sure that the lights only ever got turned off if it had been turned on by motion in the first place. This also covers the scenario of mode changing from the active mode while the lights are on but before motion goes inactive. My solution makes sure that the lights turn off in that scenario. "Mode change" turns the lights on if motion is already active when the mode changes to the active mode, which ML currently can't do.
I think Bruce is working on updating ML, and it may well do all this reliably soon anyway, but I am happier with my RM solution as I understand everything that is happening with it and I never quite felt I understood that in ML.
I had some problems with ML initially too and did the same thing. Bruce fixed a couple of the bugs that were affecting me, but I never went back and gave it another try. I have over 200 RM rules and management is getting a little bit unwieldy, so I figured this was a good time to try again. Also working on moving some of the more simple rules over to Simple Lighting for the same reason. I just paused my RM rules instead of deleting for now, so if something isn't right I can go back easily. I'm also trying to learn...RM makes sense to me so it's easy to just default to that. I want to understand the nuances of ML as well, things like these two questions that I was able to answer with a little bit of digging and/or testing. So far I haven't seen any problems. I've moved 15 of my 19 motion rules back to ML, and now that I'm getting familiar with ML it's getting easier.
