At times, we might just be sitting at the bar or the table and don't want the light to go off if motion is not detected.
Is it possible to re-create this RM rule in RL and add in a switch that is either manually pressed or ideally a virtual switch that I can tell Alexa to turn on that will disable the RM rule for turning off the lights when motion is stopped? (The reverse is needed when we want motion to again be king)
Update the RM rule to include such a switch
Tried to create a virtual button but Alexa doesn't seem to see it to turn it off/on
Have tried a few variations of RL and just can't seem to get it right
I do this with a switch. I have two routines on Alexa. When I say, "Alexa, keep lights on," then Alexa turns on the "Switch - Alexa Keep Lights". When I say, "Alexa, keep lights off," (which is a bit weird but best phrasing I could remember), the switch turns off.
The first step in my kitchen lights rule is to exit if the switch is on. (Note: Switch - Kitchen Auto Lights is a separate, mode-related switch.)
I keep it in RM because the kitchen lights rule itself is a bit too complex to work easily in RL. Plus, it's worked in RM for years so why switch?
We have periods, but they are per room and may overlap. And the times of the periods differ each day. Eg, one night my daughter may go to sleep at 8.15pm, the next not till 9pm because she spent the evening fell running. Let me try to clarify by explaining our use case.
We have 3 bedrooms. In my daughter's bedroom, before she goes to bed, we press the lock button in her room, to lock her light, so that when reading to her, the lights stay on without motion. Afterwards we press the sleep button in her room to transition her bedroom to sleep settings. A kids night-light comes on and stays on all night. In the morning we press the sleep button again to go to normal day settings, and the night-light switches off. These button presses can also be done via Alexa. Similarly with my son's bedroom and our bedroom, but in those rooms, in sleep settings Hue Bloom lights comes on for a set period only when motion is detected. The times the 3 bedrooms lock, sleep or wake differs each day. And during the day we may lock a room's lights when doing an activity with little movement. Also non-bedroom rooms have this lock mode. A lock times out after a set time (the set time depending on the room), to avoid lights being left on unintentionally if forgetting to unlock the room. At 8.15pm or when a kids bedroom is set to sleep, which-ever is earlier, the Hubitat mode "Night kids" is activated, which is used to set lighting levels to dim in the main bathroom and hallways near their rooms. The lock buttons in a room/hallway can be used to override this when necessary.
How would I achieve the above using Room Lights? I don't understand how I can use it to use a button press to transition relevant periods for each bedroom independently.
This came from a question/discussion on FB last night from Frank Ribitch about the desire to override the motion sensor controlling the lighting inside his garage. I worked this a while back and had used Rule Machine to solve it, but the ensuing discussion prompted me to investigate the newer Room Lighting app to solve. Here is what I came up with. May be of use to others:
Motion sensed from a Zooz ZSE18 motion sensor turns on GE/Jasco Enbrighten Zwave Smart Switch (Garage Inside Lights) for 5 minutes then they shut off if no further motion
If you manually press the up (on) button on the Smart Switch, the garage lights turn on if they are not on already, and the motion auto-shutoff is disabled
If you manually press the down (off) button on the Smart Switch, the garage lights turn off and the motion sensing is re-enabled.
Pretty simple but it works, and much cleaner than using Rule Machine.
Help pls? I must be missing something.
I have a switch to turn on a light. I setup a RL to turn the light on if there is motion.
I want to turn OFF the light if motion in other rooms. I looked under 'Means to Turn Off Lights' for 'Motion Active' and don't see it. Isn't that where I should be looking? (to circumvent, I'm using custom attribute which works perfectly fine)
Here's an odd issue. I have a simple setup: turn on the light at level 100 and color temp 2700. But the light turns on at level 45-55 instead (it varies). It changes to this level even if I manually set the lamp to 100 in the device page.
I'm not sure if it matters, but Dining Room Puzzle Lamp (dev:782) is a Sylvania Zigbee Smart+ BR30 RGBW (75584). It is using the Generic Zigbee RBGW Light device type.
Good question. I don't know. We can see that the app sends the command, either setColorTemperature in the first case, or setLevel in the second case. But the device acts as if all it sees is 'on'. Maybe @mike.maxwell could look at this. Can you control this light correctly from its device page? Specifically, try this from the device page:
set the level of the light to 50.
turn it off.
Put in 2700 and 100 into the setColorTemperature command on the device page, and hit that tile.
What happens? Show the Current States from the device page after those steps.
If I put both those and click setColorTemperature, I get a random level that seems to be in the range 45-55. I set it to 100, turned it off, and then clicked setColorTemperature a few times:
It's something weird in the Generic Zigbee RGBW Light handler. If I switch it to the Advanced Zigbee RGBW Bulb it seems to work as expected.
(although from the logs it looks like even when I do setColorTemperature with 2700,100 and the state shows the bulb is already at those settings, it only turns on the bulb)