[Released] Rule 4.0

My advice is to always use the simplest tool that solves the need. I have almost 30 instance of Motion Lighting, and wouldn't dream of doing those in RM. I have instances of Simple Lighting as well, and push those things that it supports there. There is no downside to having as many rules as you want, as many Motion Lighting instances as you want, etc. When you say "all running", you really mean that they have a live subscription in the database for events that trigger them. They only run now and then. Those subscriptions in the database consume no resources (well, a tiny amount of storage in the db, its caches, etc.).

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Why bother? Don't fix it if it isn't broken.

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The fact that you're typing rules that way, rather than providing screen shots, is an excellent example that it would be highly beneficial to users to provide a textual interface for writing & debugging complex rules.

If you had any idea how many rules I create on any given day you'd have more understanding for why sometimes its easier to just type something than to create a rule, take screenshots, etc. Besides, how do I get a users devices into my rule? Should I also create some virtual devices to set it all up? The idea is to give help to someone who needs it. Not disputing that there could be better user interfaces than what we have. That's a never ending possibility --> seeking an ever better way to define automations. You haven't been around to see the progress in the RM UI over the past several months.

Having said that, what you're asking for is not a small undertaking, in fact, it would be a rather large undertaking. There are UI projects of higher priority than more UI work on RM. Our focus has to be on helping people new to home automation, not on making things slicker for people able to deal with RM.

But thanks for the encouragement! :sunglasses:

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Has anyone else noticed that you cannot select two different types of speakers for notifications for an RM4.0 action? Any time I combine Google Home and Echo devices on any single action, it completely fails. If I separate them into two different actions, then they play fine. This also seems to impact me if I try to use the "Follow Me" app/driver stuff. If this is a limitation in the core architecture, is it possible to have RM simply give you a drop-down of "what type of speaker?" then have that auto-populate a list of similar-class devices that will not break the automation? I have been fighting this for a bit, and feel silly now that I figured it out.

This the first I've heard of this. Will investigate...

Oddly enough, I just blew away all my speaker integrations and re-created them from scratch. Now they seem to be playing nicely. Very odd. Echo+Sonos+Google Home. If somehow logs on my end would help, I'd be glad to provide.

I'll look into this myself tomorrow morning, see what turns up.

I am working on a rule for my daughters room that turns on or off a sound machine as well as fades up or down the main lights based on a pico remote. I have a couple of problems/questions.

The first is when I use the Fade function it allows for fade in minutes. Is there a way to fade in less than a minute? Say 45 seconds? If I put .75 the rule does not work.

The next issue is that my lights have a dead spot from 0 to about 20%. So it seems as though nothing is happening until it gets past 20%. Right now I used the Dim function to go from 0 to 20% (or 30%). Now I need to fade the rest of the way to 100%. What is the best way to run the Fade to 100%? Can I run it in the same rule or do I need to create a new rule?

This is what I currently have:
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I really appreciate the ability to use the buttons device right in the rule. Really simplifies it!

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At the moment minutes is all that is supported. On the to-do list is to allow fractional minutes.

You can do it in the same rule.

Can you assist with an example? I am failing in my attempts thus far.

Sorry, example of what?

Just a bit more information on this. While my hub was in this 'state' where speaking devices were behaving badly, for the most part I could not trigger speech manually through the device details pages. Also, No matter how hard I tried, I could not send pushes to my mobile app despite deleting that device several times.

Now that I have re-created all other speakers, even my phone pushes work fine. It would seem that somehow the speech channel was being cluttered or hung-up by some broken pending speech operation. I could see if this was a single-stream channel, and something was busted, it could prevent other operations as well.

How do I add the Fade to 100% option? I want to Dim from 0 to 20% or 30%, then Fade to 100% after that. There is a dead spot in my light bulb response that I am trying to program around.

I'm not seeing any problem with TTS through multiple devices.

Thanks I will try it out.

Yeah I think somehow a corrupted Sonos speech device on my setup after a few SSID changes somehow caused a conflict. Things have been working well for about 24 hours now.

Thanks for checking sir.

-SS

I'd imagine you would also want a motion-based, contact-based, switch-based rule that stops this action otherwise it would immediately dim back down to whatever interval the logic is using for the fade. Could see the WAF plummet if people forget those sorts of things. :slight_smile:

Loving RM 4.0 - had 40 RM 2.5/3.0 rules - all squished down to 12 RM 4.0 rules - much easier to troubleshoot when something happens (or doesn't).

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