Automation Help

I’m not sure the right way to handle this, so I was hoping someone could help. I have 15 devices that I want to turn on with a single voice command (Alexa) or button in the app. My problem is that I need a pause of about 1 second between devices.

How do I accomplish that with the rule creator?

Do I need a virtual switch and then use that as the trigger for the automation? If so, if I turn that virtual switch on and later turn the devices off, won’t the virtual switch being on from before, cause all the devices to turn on again?

Thanks!

It’s going to be rather difficult to get a 1 second pause between each light, and for it to be reliable. The cloud just really does not work like that. Sometimes it’s almost instant… other times it’s almost…

I highly recommend that you use WebCoRe.

I’ll take a look into webcore. I’ve never heard of it before.

I’m actually trying to turn on a bunch of pinball machines so I don’t want them all on at the same time. I could probably do them in groups of two and get it down to 7 devices.

How does it work with the virtual switch? If they switch isn’t turned off following the automation, doesn’t it just turn stuff back on if you turn the individual devices off at a later time?

You could try chaining a few virtual switches so they turn the device(s) on and another virtual switch on, which does the same for the next. The event round trip delays won’t be consistent or exactly 1s, but might be suitable for your use case.