Motion,Light,Activity State

I have a Light (ST) ,TV (HarmonyHome Control) a Motion Sensor(ST) that triggers the the light and TV to come on as soon as I enter the living room.

So the issue iis everytime a motion is detected these activities tun on.So I get up to get cup of coffee and these activities are re-fired.Although I cannot see it since the TV and Light is already on, I see a lot of Activity feed.

Does that make sense? I want to be able to check the state of these and not re-fire them.

Is there a work around?

Sure, that’s the way it should work. If you don’t want it to work that way, you’d have to use a custom app to check the state of the light and TV first, before turning them on (again).

Is there a specific reason you are looking for them not to fire again? I don’t think there is significant network overhead or anything here that would cause problems with them trying to turn on a device that’s already on.

You might be able to prevent this with a mode change. Not sure how you are triggering the Light and Harmony; but if you use the Motion Sensor to trigger a Routine that turns on the Light and changes the Mode to say TV, you could then have the Harmony trigger off the Mode change. This gets your Light and TV on when you enter the living room.

You could then set it so the Motion Sensor ignores activity once in Mode TV by setting its trigger for all other Modes only. Of course, then you would need a good way to exit TV Mode when you’re actually done watching TV, so it will turn back on the next time you walk into the living room.

Certainly, there is not over head but I just found out since this was happening my harmony activities were getting switched suddenly to my Watch TV when I was on Fire TV stick activity, if there was a motion while it going on.

Ah… okay… well that makes sense.

Then I think you’re in the situations offered above:

If you know enough coding to modify an existing app it would be pretty easy to write you own. (Put in a simple IF-THEN statement around the command to turn on the TV.)

Or if you don’t want to mess with the code, create a new mode called HomeTV that operates just like Home. Then modify the install of the app that’s controlling the TV and Lights to only run when in TV mode.

But now I’m looking through the list of canned SmartApps and I don’t see one that will change mode based on a switch being on or off. There might already exist a community app out there though.