Good morning, hubitatians. I have a burning desire to dance on an electrified third rail and throw my WAF point to the wind. IF this works, I could exponentially increase them, if it fails, well, remember how the Oregon trial game ended? yeah, that.
So, our master bedroom currently has about 9 Rule Machine rules that control about 85% of the lighting without excessive grousing from the finance department. They have requested to be able to just stop the motion lighting if they have a headache, etc. Add to that I have a very weird schedule (work all three shifts in a week, so some days do not want daytime motion lighting, or only between certain hours). Other times I want a light to turn red, then come on for an hour on arrival, then shut off sixty minutes later. I'm thinking this might be an opportunity to revisit Room Lighting (though my success in the past has been mixed. Just a small glimpse of the chaos in my mind. I know it will be very complex. Before heading down this particular rabbit hole, I was thinking of writing out the rules, times, etc. I'm going to need it. Does anyone else do this? If so, how do you go about (structure) Writing up the requirements and flow?
While I won’t be able to provide any advice on what you asked specifically…. I will say that one area where I do not bother trying to automate is bedroom lighting. I simply added a Lutron Pico remote control to each nightstand in the house, thereby providing manual, but very convenient, control to the room’s lights and fan. This has excellent WAF.
yeah, I know. I have also stayed away from it for a long time (other than just dashboard control). Since Alexa and her hunches blew out my last stash of WAF points. But in this rare instance it's being requested.
As for pre-drafting rules, I could use that for anything once I figure out the best way to do it. The just happens to be the project on tap currently.
I actually have a neutered c8 hanging around looking for work. Your suggestion sounds even MORE complicated than what I was thinking, but I m open to hearing more.
I wanted to disable motion on demand way back when variables were first introduced. I created two variables. one was an integer, the second was a string I could set to "armed" or "disabled". Then I made a rule that on motion would increment the integer but only if the string was set to armed.
Then I changed the trigger of my motion rules to the variable changes.
The string with "armed" and "disabled" are dashboard friendly and can be set from a pico or other device.
I track the number of motion triggers by monitoring and resetting the incrementing integer occasionally for other rules such as light level.
There's probably several faster ways to do this but it's been working, other than updating them to newer versions of RM with better variable support I've never looked into it.
Yes it can take some time to set up but recreating the environment - all the devices that you are working with as virtual devices on your spare hub. It gives you a perfect setup to test your rules.
Then when you are ready to go live, you export the rule set and import it on your live hub. During import you connect to all your ‘real’ devices.
I’ve done this a couple of times for critical automations that I did not want to debug live.
Ahh good point. I hadn't even thought about it in that way, but it does make a lot of sense. I wish I would have considered that before, could have saved alot of frustration!
How about doing a backup, fooling around with the rules when she's not there, and then restore when she's back. If you did a backup of your experimentation draft rules, you could restore and pickup where you left off when she goes out shopping again.
As far as motion goes, for every motion sensor that controls a toggle switch, I have a rule where a triple tap up disables motion, and down, re-enable. They are GE/Jasco toggle switches that have a blue led in the toggle. With @JasonJoel 's help, I managed to turn on the led when motion is disabled.
My Bedroom is 100% automated as well as the rest of my apartment. Of course, everything has a manual control. And yes, WAF is very high.
Two lux sensors (external and internal) are controlling main light so there is no need to push any buttons (but they do exist). Bed presence sensors (one for each side) are controlling curtains. Ceiling fan is controlled by multiple temp sensors. When one of us goes to sleep WiFi inactivity from correspondend tablet (both of us is reading something before going to sleep) turns off main light and turns on a night stand light if the other person is still active. When both of us are going to sleep everything turns off, curtainas and balcony door are closing and beds adjusted to sleeping position. So, there is no need to do anything, everything is 100% automated.
My ceiling fan has the original inovelli fan controller and is controlled by my wife via Alexa. If I attempted to alter/augment this control scheme at all I would be kick out
All my automations are 100% negotiated with my wife BEFORE they are implemented. Very often some changes and adjustments are required because it is very hard to do things right on a first try. Anyway as of today WAF is very high.
Good luck!
