I have some motion rules set up using the Motion App. Everything works great, but sometimes I want to disable the motion detection temporarily. I see some options in the Motion app for turning on/off the lights, etc, but what I really want to do is "Pause" the rule. My solution was to create a virtual switch called "Enable Office Motion Lights" and when it's turned off, I have a Rule Machine rule to wait 4-hours and then turn it back on.
The issue is that I cannot find a way to tie that switch to the pause/unpause functionality. Am I missing something or is that not possible?
Rule machine can pause and resume another RM rule but not motion lighting or simply automation. Simple automation has a restriction to disable an automation based on a switch so if your ML rule is pretty simple you can move it there. It can be done in ML too but on and off are treated separately so you will have to click into the On and Off options to set your virtual switch to disable. That will be done in the Switch to disable turning on and switch to disable turning off settings.
There is an option in motion lighting for a switch or contact for disabling turn on and turning off.
If you set both options to the same switch/contact this will in effect pause your rule.
I completely agree.
I already used a switch to keep my lights on in a couple of rules and ended up having to modify a virtual switch driver to add contact sensor abilities in order to us Google home to pause my rules.
I also do this type of thing.
The way I do it is as follows:
The way we "signal" that we don't want this rule to work (in our case for 90 minutes), is we turn off a light.
That light turning off, turns on another virtual switch, which is defined as a virtual switch timer (with reset).
In my motion lighting, in order to turn on the switch, it first checks to make sure that the virtual switch is off.
That process pauses the motion lighting app, for the number of minutes (or seconds) specified in the switch timer (with reset).
@jacobgraf I wanted to confirm you saw that the latest firmware update now allows you to pause Simple Automation and Motion Lighting rules via Rule Machine:
