I was gone for the weekend and I had my daughter take care of the house. I have a set of rules that manage the room fans. The first rule is for the pico sitting right by the bed. The second is for when the fans should turn on and and what speeds.
When I got home I asked her how everything was and she said great except for the fans. She said when she turned the guest room fan on, it would shut off shortly thereafter. I'm looking at the code and can't figure out why. Then she tells me she took the tablet I provided with a series of dashboards all around the house and used that to control things (instead of the pico right by the bed with the little fans on it).
So, millennial jokes aside, is there a way to take the output from the selection of the fan tile on a dashboard (e.g. low) and use it as a way to override an existing rule (like what I did with the buttons and pausing the fan rule).
And yes, I am working on permanently mounting the dashboard so this doesn't happen again.
The easiest way I can think of would be to create a virtual fan control and use that for the dashboard and then have a RM rule to test that. I do it with virtual switches and Alexa so that if someone says "turn on X device" or "Change X device to X", Alexa is only changing the virtual device. Then I have RM rules that trigger the real devices and provides an override for situations where someone turns something on or off manually.
It's messy on the back-end, but pretty much invisible to users.
You were spot on, but there wasn't much in the back end to worry about. I created a virtual fan device and then programed it just like the button-controller:
I changed the fan in the dashboard to the virtual fan and it's now millennial proof. The last glitch is the fan switch itself. I have a GE 12730 Paddle Fan Controller. I'm trying to think of how to loop that into all of this so if a guest uses the wall switch instead of the dashboard or the pico, things work as expected.
So far duct tape is coming up as the best solution.
That's easy. Write a RM rule to capture when the wall switch throws events (there should be only 4 or 5 events to trap) and pass that to the virtual fan. That way, everything should stay in sync no matter what triggers it.
Duct tape is my go-to for keeping people from using switches. LOL
