Room Lighting Help

Trying to do something simple that I had working before I moved it to Room Lighting.

This should be pretty simple. I have a closet light connected to a GE Switch with a built in motion sensor. What I want to do is normally have the light turn on with motion and stay on for a period of time and then turn off. This is easy and is already working fine except for when I try to do the next thing I want. I also want a override that will allow the physical switch to be pressed that will disable the light from turning off.

Previously I have used a secondary virtual switch that simply says if turned on don't turn off the light. But trying to do that with Room Lighting seems to cause some out of sync issues. The reason is that the secondary virtual switch seems to update after the RM try's to turn off the device and says it can't because it isn't allowed.

Below are the logs showing what i am talking about

The result is that the Room lighting rule ends up out of sync and since it won't activate a light that it thinks is already active it just stops working.

I am hoping someone can just point me do the right method to make this work, but I can't seem to find it.

My Room lighting rules are:

I have also trying using the physical switch option since that would even be better but that doesn't seem to be recognized by the app. Your help will be greatly appreciated. My alternative is just go to back to doing the lighting in RM as it was before.

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For my convoluted bathroom lighting setup that's primarily motion-based, I set up the corresponding smart switch's buttons in the Button Controller app as if motion was not part of the equation.

Then I can leverage those button commands in the motion-based RL setup (e.g. disable RL's motion X action if switch button Y is pressed etc).

But I'm using a standalone motion sensor and separate smart switch, so perhaps this won't be useful for your combined unit.

Aside from that, I'd recommend using the "Activate even if partially activated" option in the RL's "Means to Activate" section (under "Other Activation Options"). I now always set that option in all my RL rules -- it seems to help in many cases, and I don't see any downsides to using it. There's a correspondingly similar option in the "Mans to Turn Off Lights" section.

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I think i found the solution and @hydro311 kind of lead me down the path. The solution i think will work is as below .

First I removed the switch from the activate and turn off options. Reguardless of RL it was going to do it's thing to turn the relay on and off. So that was somewhat redundent.
Second I took another look through the alternative and additional settings and found one that i hadn't used yet under turn off alternatives. There is a option for "Switches that determine all lights are off". I set that to the off button for the physical switch.

The RL app now looks like this:


It sems that the option to have that switch represent everything off reset the rule when it is pressed to a turned off state.

I should also point out the option @hydro311 mentioned would have worked as well. It does seem that it would have allowed the activation to be submitted even when RL got out of sync. This means it would have been out of sync for that attempt and then gotten back in sync afterwards.

So either option works, but I am going to use this one as it seems to just keep in more accurate to what it should be.

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You found the answer. But also, since it's a single light you could add the switch 'off' to the means to turn off lights. RL thinks that it knows everything, so when you pause it and turn off the lights its internal state gets out of sync. And I agree that "Switches that determine all lights are off" is a better way of managing the app than using "Activate even if partially activated". All of my motion RL apps have turning off limits. So setting "Switches that determine all lights are off" is a standard part of my setup.

This is actually part of how it was setup before. The problem was when i just had the switch set to turn it off it would get blocked as RL said it was disabled because of the option used to disable turning off being set to a virtual switch that was on. When looking at the logs it was clearly a timing issue. just moments later the switch would be turned off and then everything would be out of sync.

I really would like to eliminate the virtual switch used to disable it, but when i tried to do that it seems RL doesn't really recognize physical switch actions well.

Ah, I see what you mean. Physical differentiation is available in the activation section. But you need it in the Off options area too. Perhaps you could request physical differentiation be added to 'Disable Turning Off upon these Events' selection.

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