Motion Lighting Thought

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@bravenel It is a happy occasion when I get to say something nice, instead of cranky. :slight_smile:

When I originally setup my lighting in Hubitat, I could never get Motion Lighting to do exactly what I needed (time based override, override switches, etc).

I thought I would take a peek at it again since it had been 9+ months since I last looked at it. Wow, It is a lot more functional than it used to be. For fun I converted a few of my RMs over to Motion Lighting, and found I could do pretty much everything I needed to.

The only thing I couldn't do it turn lights ON based on a contact, so I have to leave those RMs around. In case anyone is wondering, I turn on the lights proactively based on contacts when someone enters a room via a door that is normally closed. It tends to be a little faster than waiting for motion to detect since zigbee contact sensors are so blazingly fast.

Really nice job Bruce. Just like RM, things have really improved a lot in the past year with Motion Lighting.

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Thanks. That one is a bit of a tough one to get right.

Sounds like an option for turn on from contact opening would help. Haha, you watch, if I add that, next thing will be a request for turn off from contact closing.

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I wholeheartedly agree with @JasonJoel, the Apps have come a long way in a short time.
And yep, "Feature Creep" is a bitch !
:slight_smile:

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And yet people make fun of me when I suggest someone who's totally new to Hubitat should try starting here instead of going straight to Rule Machine on their first day... :laughing:

(I also like to point out how many features they've added. My secret wishlist is dimming before off, but I have a custom app that can already do that, and I really don't think all of this is best handled at the app level, anyway--Mike might have some driver tricks up his sleeve with prestaging, which would allow for what in my opinion would be the best solution so the app doesn't have to fake it all.)

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if you had too many new features, you'll have to rename the app too. It won't be Motion Lighting anymore it will just be... Lighting. :slight_smile:

And don't add anything on my account. I'm fine using a few RM rules for edge cases.

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Yup. I would love that to be part of motion lighting. Right now, I'm using a combination of RM and ML to control lights in closets and my garage.

Thanks for considering it!

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I was struggling with motion lighting about 9 months ago. Agreed as time passed and at some point I made it my goal to transfer ALL of my lighting rules to either simple lighting or motion lighting. I'm 95% there at this point. I'm happy with that number...it was also the biggest nightmare in the house with the family. I can finally say that the last 3-4 months. I haven't really touched much in HE regarding them. (minor tweaks for time/etc) and it just keeps working! Of course you just reminded me of one situation I'd like to resolve...and I'll bet someone on here has a great idea...but that's for another thread!

Thanks @bravenel !

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So I still have plenty of stuff under RM. That's because I'm only using the lights to turn off when there's no activity in the room for so many minutes.

I also need to set booleans to false on some rules, because I have another rule running. Wake Up Light, and I don't want the one rule turning off the light. So I set a boolean of false on that rule for an hour, then set it back to true.

I see you can use virtual switches which would technically do the same thing as booleans, but I'm also faced with stuff like. I want it to trigger the off count down if the lights are turned on remotely. I don't want to wait for motion changes to trigger the rule. I want to include light changes as a trigger too.

If motion lighting and simple lighting would allow multiple triggers then I could convert.