I have a feeling this is fairly straightforward/obvious, but I wanted to confirm
For example my garage has 2 motion sensors and a door contact sensor. I’ve got this all set up and working as desired - turns on and off how I want.
But how about walking into the garage and wanting the lights to stay on sometimes, because I plan to be in there for a while. Thr switch is already on via the automation… so how do I go “okay now stay on until I’m done”. I guess until I manually turn them off? Or perhaps a much longer timeout to allow motion sensors to possibly fire again?
I do this with a smart switch in the garage - I programmed an upper paddle hold to override the motion sensor and keep the lights on until they are turned off.
Then, whenever they are turned off (physical or digital), the control is programmed to reset back to motion-based.
So I need an extra button or voice to disable the eventual motion off? I can’t use the switch - since it’s already on? (Though post below with a hold is an interesting “workaround”)
Nuts, I apologize - I sometimes forget that my garage lighting setup is pretty unorthodox, so I fear details of my setup wouldn't actually translate helpfully.
But I still think having some sort of override/reset actions could work, even if that meant juggling some of this outside of RL (something like having the override pause the motion rule, then the reset resumes it).
I do this in most of my rooms. I will try and grab some screenshot later this evening, but I have also posted about it previously, so you may be able to find details on another topic.
Yes, some switch will show as “Physically On” and that can be used to turn on the virtual switch. Others, like Inovelli, can be programmed to use the Config button or multi-tap. These options would all allow for this to work.
So I tried out one of my rooms, and after the switch is turned on and I tap the on, nothing happens at all. I had to turn it off then on again. And I can see there is a differentiation between digital and physical, though not sure if I can still trigger physical if still on. Will look into that side more - it’s a Zooz
If your Zooz supports multi tap, then create a virtual switch that you turn on by 2x tapping the Zooz switch on. When you want the light to just stay on you 2x up, which turns on a virtual switch. You write the rule to ignore the motion sensor when the virtual switch is on.
When you are done and want the light to operate based on motion sensor trigger again, you 2x down. You define 2x down as turning off the virtual switch.
Maybe that’s the right way, but then I’m going to have to create a virtual switch for all my rooms? I guess there’s no limit on devices but just feels like it could get a bit overwhelming having virtual switches everywhere? (I’ve never created / used a virtual switch yet)
You would only create the virtual switch for the rooms where you want the ability to override the motion control and leave the light on. The virtual switch exists only in HE.
Physically, you only 2x tap up to freeze the light on, and 2x tap down to cancel the freeze.
Instead of the virtual switch you could also write a rule that says if the light goes on due to motion sensor trigger, a physical tap up on the switch while the light is still on leaves the light on until you physically tap down to turn the light off.
I can understand it may feel a bit messy, particularly if you have a lot of rooms. The way I look at it (and use this setup) is that the virtual switch provides a separation between the methods I use to control the motion lighting and the actual use of this "setting". By that I mean, I can introduce any number of places or methods where I want to disable / enable motion lighting such as Button Controllers or RM rules, etc, all referencing the VS, but only need to reference the VS in my RL setup, not needing to touch the RL instance or have something that can talk to it whenever I want to add a new method to turn motion lighting on or off, they simply need to control the VS. I think I mentioned in my post that I have both Button Controllers for the physical buttons I use, but also have entries in my RM rules for mode transitions to turn motion lighting back on when I transition to Night mode. The VS is also something that can be made available outside of HE via Maker API, if that is something that would interest you. On the flipside, your setup in RL could be swapped out for RM rules or some other App in the future if you choose, but the mechanism to manage motion lighting being active or not can most likely remain in place through the control of the VS.
That's a long-winded way of saying I like the way I set mine up
The issue can be that for typical activity in a room you may either place pir motion sensors in locations that pick up normal movement in or out of the room or where tasks involving a lot of movement are involved, or the other issue can be if they are pir sensors, so some activity is less likely to be detected, hence the interest in mmWave sensors for things like watching TV, working at a desk, etc, where movement is much more subtle.
So there can be situations where you don't want to be sitting in a room for an extended period and the lights go out. For me, I do things like disable the motion lighting in my Study after I press a button to turn on the TV I use as a monitor. Any other time when I come in and out of the room the motion sensors are being used. I will eventually start to use the Aqara fp2 sensor instead.
