Stopping a motion from overriding current setting

📐 Rule Machine®
1

Hi,
Looking for a little help with setting up a hall light that is either turned on with a button rule or motion sensor.

I have a rule set up for turning on the light to bright with a press of a button and turning off with another press. I also have a motion & mode lighting app set up for getting the motion sensor to turn the light on too dim when activated and staying on for a minute before turning off.

I now situation that if the light is manually turned on and then activated by the motion sensor it drops down to dim then turns off after the minute.

What I would like to happen is if the light is manually set to on then the motion sensor is cancelled out, ie. does nothing.

I can see in the motion light app how to not turn off after motion activation but not a setting that says do not turn on if already on. Any ideas to help ?

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2

I've tried to setup something similar and eventually moved from the motion lighting app to RM rules because I couldn't get this to work. Someone recently suggested looking at the Alexa option in motion lighting for manual control, but I haven't tried it yet. I'll find some of the posts shortly.

3

I use a similar setup with a bedroom light, the way I handle it is to toggle the motion rule when the button is pushed.

Add a "disable rule" to the action in the rule turning the light on with the button and then re-enable it with the off action so the sensor will control the lights again.

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4

Here's the post where the suggestion for using the Alexa option on motion lighting was made by @cjkeenan.

5

Also, here's the link to the original post where I walk through the rules I setup to replace the motion lighting, but I would certainly test out the options in motion lighting first before moving to RM.

6

You can just use a conditional in RM. Check if the light is already on and if it is then don't turn it on. For example you could use the command to "exit rule" if the light is already on.

Just in case it helps anyone else in the future... I do something similar but a bit more complicated for my Living Room. I have all CCT lights in the property go through a circadian sequence with their level and temp updated every 2 minutes. However, if someone adjusts the lights in the Living Room to something else off the curve of the circadian cycle (for watching TV for example or just personal choice), then I don't want those lights to change every 2 minutes back onto the cycle. So I have a conditional that checks if the current level and temp of the lights are very close to the required settings driven from the circadian routine, and if so then execute the update, but if not then do not change them because they've been set by someone to be different (eg don't change whatever setting it had in terms of brightness level and temp). It works quite nicely.

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7

Thanks for the replies, I have now taken the turning on of the light with motion sensor from the 'motion and mode lighting app' and experimenting with a RM routine to only run if light is switched off when motion is detected. So far works better than before, still needs a little work as I have a scenario that if the motion sensor sees you before you get to turn the light on the race is on for which rule takes action

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