Ok, so I’ve spent way too long on this problem and need to know if it can be done at all by either wiring it differently (open to ideas) or rule machine.
We’ve always had a 3 position switch which has the options on, on via pir and off. So to make this clever I was wanting to pull in the motion sensor to hubitat to make use of motion being detected but also keeping the option to turn the lights on permanently and off permanently. I appreciate that when it’s off it effectively kills all the power but that’s fine.
Has anyone come across this or has done this before?
Sorry the 3 position switch is something that we run on about 15 light switches however the convo we were having was for a new installation. I am looking to change the 3 position ones once a working solution is found. I'll wire this up as you have suggested
ok, so i've binned the aeotec off and gone with a qubino relay which seems to work better but not perfect sadly.
wiring the switch and the pir works to a point in series. The pir will turn on the light and off as expected. The physical switch wont turn the light on unless the pir has activated and at that point it stays on (this we can work with and is fine if that's the best we can do) however the downfall comes when we use hubitat to turn off the physical switch and the physical switch is still in the on position. At this point the relay has some sort of fit and cant work out what's happening. Mainly because I assume the pir should be a toggle setting and the physical is a momentary one.
Any other ideas on how to make this work? Happy for any creative ideas at this point!?
Provide model number of relay, and link to manual if possible. I can review the manual and give a wiring recommendation if it is possible to do what you want. May also need to adjust some settings on the device. Qubino usually has much better instructions and settings so we might get somewhere with this one.
They should be wired in parallel per the diagram above. From the sounds of it, you do have them in series, not sure why? Looks like the wiring on the Qubino will be identical to what I recommended for the Aeotech. With both outputs wired together to the light. This would send voltage to the light if either switch is on, or both. Basically the same as Page 25 of the manual, except both outputs go to the same light.
Manual Page 44, parameter 1 and 2, both will need to change to on/off toggle mode.
Optional, may want to set 40 & 41 to 0 to disable power reporting if not needed.
Sorry, they are wired in parallel as per your diagram and the switch is set to toggle. So as it stands, pir does turn the lights on, physical switch does turn the lights on if the pir has been activated and it does keeps the lights on. However when we the physical switch has been turned on and hubitat asks the relay to turn the switch off it flicks the lights on and off as if its trying to turn them off but cant. Any ideas from here?
It will probably only work with a momentary switch.
What they call toggle on/off is just on/off mode where on is on and off is off.
You could set the parameter for just the switch to momentary. Then to simulate a press from a momentary from a regular switch just flip it on then off quickly. Once would turn on, and then once again would turn back off.
It’s too bad they don’t have a true toggle mode like the zen52, that device would probably actually work. If I knew you were getting a different device I could have test wired it up.
I am not sure if it helps, but do this in a way with a GE Motion Sensor switch. Is the motion sensor part of the switch or just a seperate piece of kit. Can it be integrated independently of the swtich.
If so you can use Room lighting and the ability to use physical vs digital control to turn the manual control on and off and have it override the motion sensor. This would be kind of like what @jtp10181 mentioned with a momentary switch.
With the GE Motion Light Switch and Room lighting yes. But that switch is not a 3 position switch, and is a momentary switch as stated above. If you sacrafice the 3rd position in your current switch and just use it as a on/off with the relay add on's you have been looking at, and seperate the PIR motion sensor from the switch, then it can probably be done with RL. Though i will say this depends a little on it's ability to recognize Digital on/off vs physical on/off. That would depend on the relay device you are using and how well it distinquishes the two states.
Ability to sepreate the Motion sensor from the Physical switch
The ability to see the swtich state
The ability to distinquish between you flipping the physical switch and the Hub sending the on command.
The ability to let the hub control the switch based on motion and not the switch based on motion.
The main thing I am not 100% sure of is the impact of using a relay instead of a smart switch. It seems like the physical switch could get out of sync with the relay. I just don't have expereince with those relay devices to know how they will impact this. It seems like it should work in theory you just may have some werid out of sync conditions, but that may also be usefule depending on how the relay reports it.
Here is the RL setup so it isn't very complicated. This swich is physically connected to the light it controls.
The switch that disables off is a virtual switch in hubitat. and there is a simple rule in RM that turns it on and off based on the physical switch being activated. It is below
Yeah the main problem thus far is the relays tried just do not cooperate with this setup. I don't think any amount of rules is going to make it work. It is failing at a hardware level.
So if we forget the motion sensor for a moment, If the switch and the relay are the only two parts involved does flipping the switch turn the relay on/and off and how does it get reported to hubitat. Does it know when it is turned on or off?
OP can confirm but flipping the switch should be reporting back to the hub the on/off state of the relay itself. The problem is happening if they flip the switch ON but then want to turn the light off via an automation, I do not think it matters what state the motion sensor is at. The relay does not seem to like that, he said it just keeps forcing itself back on again. Possibly because the switch is on? Not sure if its a limitation of this relay or a wiring problem. It does seem like Qubino would have this sorted out properly, seems people always have good reviews of their devices.
He also said the switch only forces the lights to stay on if the PIR is activated first, which also sounds like a wiring issue. As the switch should be working totally independent of the motion sensor. Maybe my understanding of electrical wiring is lacking but I did confirm what I thought with some diagrams I found online (shown up above somewhere).
