I have a couple of lighting rules that run in an evening triggered by motion - they basically set lights in an open plan area to a warmer white as a first step and then later in the evening turns some lights off and lamps on etc.
Iām using motion sensors to only trigger when the room is occupied.
Although they work, I donāt think Iāve written these in an optimal way and hoping for a few tips on how I might optimise.. Thanks in advance!!
You might want to consider using Scenes, one scene for each. Then, you could simply play around with how you want the lights for each, then capture that scene, change the action to scene transition from one to the other. Makes it easier to tweak how you want it.
To me, that's one of the best reasons to use the Motion Lighting app - it handles all of these details. In fact, I believe that Motion Lighting could handle this, especially with scenes. That's how I do all my room motion - vacant and occupied scenes.
Switched to scenes - thatās much easier to manage! Thanks for the tip - I hadnāt explored scenes... a few quirks with the capture but all working now..
I was coming back to ask about the motion triggering the evaluation unnecessarily i.e. if it already has a scene active - no need to re-evaluate .. is the motion app mentioned a community app?
So this is where I landed; itās not quite right for my use case though; ideally unless the override switch is on, Iād want it to activate the scene on repeat movement. What seems to happen is, it activates on first movement, if some devices are switched off manually, the scene changes to not active, but iād expect movement to trigger the scene again... it doesnāt...
The reason I like it this way is if the lighting is messed with inadvertently it will revert back to the scene unless it is explicitly overridden..
Is there a way to have it handle repeat events differently?
Create a motion aggregation group for your Konnected Hallway and Living Room motion sensors so motion in either counts as one activation instead of two. In the motion aggregation group extend the activation time to say 5 minutes. You can tweak the timeout on the aggregation group to your liking.
Itās a shame the motion app doesnāt re-run actions on each motion if for example a scene moves to a not set state from a manual change to a device - but I guess this is really for turning lights on on motion and auto off again..
In the aggregation set up - does the mode setting, mean that the virtual motion sensor will only activate in specific modes? If so thatās another way I can reduce the need to run the rule and evaluation step on motion..
As you start building up all your rules sometimes you'll have overlapping executions of things going on. You don't want to get to the point where you are saturating the mesh and missing events or executions. It's better to build in the rate limiting early so you don't have problems later.