That was where I was going to head with my contribution.... Even though I did "like" the original post you made, and having used ML for most of my lighting setup atm, the more I think about it, if you compare Simple Rules to RM, they are very different UI's, in the sense that SR is tailored quite heavily to a quick and easy setup, whereas RM is the full experience. ML and RL are probably too similar, and so maintaining them side-by-side doesn't really make sense in terms of maintaining documentation and the code, etc. So I can understand picking Room Lighting and running with it, making adjustments as needed to help people get more comfortable with it.
I think both apps are complex, mostly because the scenarios some of us dream up can be complex
RL definitely felt more daunting/complicated when I first started using it vs. Motion Lighting. The learning curve in RL was steeper for me than Motion Lighting, and it was frankly a little scary to look at on first launch when I selected a room that has more than a few devices in it. You don't have to use the rooms approach, but it sounded like the most logical approach...so I chose it.
Screens where I can start automating my family room lights in each app.
Motion Lighting: Relatively simple UI but pretty effective top-level UI, provides basic guidance to choose sensors, lights, parameters/options, etc. Can be work to dig around for where a particular setting is found.
Room Lighting: A bit mind-blowing initially in Room mode...enables a lot of things that may not apply to your automation intentions, and the very detailed table, while being very powerful, takes a while to get used to/figure out.
I've moved over to using RL (imported my existing ML automations and made a few new ones) and I'm OK with it now overall. I use the option to select devices to automate and find that approach (rather than Rooms) fits my use-cases and brain the best in most cases/rooms.
True, but these were migrated from room lighting. They worked until I made some minor changes and then, after that, I could never get them to work again, even after reverting to the original config (I took screenshots, so I could revert back if needed, not that it helped).
That's actually not an automation I use...that's just the first sceen that appears in RL when I select my Family Room as the room I want to automate. Yup - I was not ready for that.
I never actually used that to create my automations - just too much to deal with for my needs. I ended up backing out of that screen and used the option to select devices in my family room to create my room lighting automations for that room, and found that works for me.
Could it be that something else has changed in your setup, like a device has been removed, or something similar? Have you checked your logs to see if there is anything showing up there?
I just read though this thread and am sad to see motion lighting be deprecated. I have it installed so I'm fine for now but I don't like keeping deprecated stuff around so I will rewrite in RM or RL - not sure which yet. I tried RL when it first came out and found it to be too buggy for my liking so I gave up. I'm sure it is fine now. Since then I have become quite good at writing Rule Machine 5.1 logic and I find it oddly satisfying knowing that I can make any tweak needed instead of being limited to the built in logic of RL or simple rules.
Would it be possible to support creating a RM rule from a motion lighting rule like you can from Simple Rules? Probably not but thought I would ask.
Say what? For what possible reason?? I've got apps dating back to the very beginning. They all still work, are all editable. This is obviously your choice, but not a reason for us not to retire the app.
No, this wouldn't be possible. Some Motion Lighting instances would take multiple RM rules to implement, and it would be inordinately complicated.
It is possible to import Motion Lighting into Room Lighting, and get the exact same automation. And yes, most of the early bugs have been worked out.
Awesome - thanks Bruce. I'm looking at RL now and see the migration from motion lighting. The reason I prefer to migrate off of deprecated code is because new people by definition won't use it so it won't be nurtured by their ideas. I agree it isn't a reason to not deprecate the app. In this case I will probably just leave it since I really like its simplicity, and I have a motion lighting rule for just about every room in my house already set up.
I had 35 of them for my house. I imported every single one into Room Lights very early on so that I would be 'dog-fooding' the app. Now I have over 40 of those. I actually kept all of my ML instances, but each disabled. I did that so I could re-import to make sure importing works, or if I needed to debug something with import.
