Rule Machine Feature Requests

Awesome - thanks! I set up the rule using NOT and will know tonight whether it worked as expected (I’d rather not mess with the door remotely…)

I’m curious, what kind of door controls are you talking about?

It’s an automated chicken coop door controller I built for my wife (running on an ESP8266 with custom code and using a custom device type via LAN IP). It opens/closes the door based on light level (while connected to my hub it doesn’t depend on the scheduler and will run fully autonomous) and the automation will help me sleep better in the morning as my wife no longer gets up at sunrise :sleeping:

The additional states were required to be able to alert me if the door mechanism failed so that I can check on things (e.g., door is closing or door is opening - send message after xxx minutes (cancel on truth change) and send a ‘stop’ command to the door in order to not run down the battery by trying to drive a stuck door forever - the whole coop is running of a 12V and solar panel so that it can be moved around without having to trail a power cord). I just finished building everything last weekend and while things worked well so far I have to keep an eye on things to iron out issues…

2 Likes

Awesome… Thank you.

@bravenel Unfortunately, what I did and posted earlier this week doesn’t work.

Even with the trigger of a physical press ON of a switch, the trigger fires when the switch changes state with Action True of a rule. I really don’t know what to do do isolate a physical press ON or OFF of a switch the disable/enable a rule…

I’m open to ideas from everyone!

I can help you with this, but I can’t read this… Sorry…

Let me know exactly what you’re wanting to do.

Thanks bamarayne,

The light in my kitchen use a simple rule to turn on with motion, cancel, off, 5 mins. This is easy. Sometimes, I don’t want this rule to be used. I would like to physically push the dimmer to ON to disable the rule and physically push the dimmer to OFF to enable back the rule.

I tried to create 2 triggers the control the main lighting rule. The first one triggers with a physical press ON and set the PB of my lighting rule to true. The second trigger do the opposite. So far so good, the main rule has the option enable/disable with private boolean.

The problem is when the main rule is active, and there is motion, it fires my trigger for the physical press on the dimmer. That shouldn’t happen and I guess that the dimmer doesn’t know the difference between a physical press and when it’s ON with a rule. Maybe it’s something I should solve in the device handler…

LJ

I can help with this, no problem. I actually have this exact scenario set up in my office… Triggered with motion, physical press turns on/off the override.

What kind of dimmer are you using? GE? Does it have a neutral?

Do me a favor…

Open your ST app to that device, turn the dimmer off, pres physically press the dimmer and count how long it takes to update its stays in the app.

Thanks

Ok, here are the screen shots of how I make this work very reliably.

Question - is your switch within range of your motion sensor? If it is, you will have to physically turn off the switch, wait for it to update the status, then physically turn it back on.

I use three rules for stability. The physical press option in ST tends to be about as stable as the scheduler

This is the rule that turns on/off the lights via motion. It’s a conditional trigger rule

This one turns on the override. It just disables the rule above.

This rule turns off the override.

Huge thanks for your help. I have the same 3 rules except that in my override off I use physical off and you use switch off. I will change that and report after 1-2 days. I will also try this with another dimmer. The dimmer I used for this rule is the leviton DZMX1, the only one I have of this kind. I will try on the GE and Cooper dimmers.

LJ

I use about 30 of these. If you have a problem with Physical On/Off, let me know. There are issues with device handlers. Are you on V1 or V2 hub?

@bamarayne, are you getting Physical events? You’re on V2, correct?

Yes, I only use the physical on to enable the override.
I use switch off to disable because sometimes I walk out and I’ll just tell Alexa to turn off the light.

This ensures that the override is disabled no matter what.

I’m using GE switches.
Yes, I get physical events and yes I’m on V2.

Both rules that ran tonight on my door and used NOT in their rule logic worked as expected - thanks again!

1 Like

I’m intrigued by this option…
Will you please post screenshots of your rule?
Thanks

I guess only one of those was using NOT - the other was using the newly added door states of opening and closing

Wouldn’t this work if you used the rule condition “chicken coop closed”, using the same “chicken coop closed” and putting your current actions for true in the actions for false?

Yes - I guess so. My mind just has a hard time wrapping around actions on false only…

Every time I’ve come up with a scenario to use this, I keep defaulting back to using actions for false as my rule instead… But that is because when RM was first released I immediately started using the “lack of action is the action” aspect of the logic.

That sounds like my exercise excuse.

But… Yea, I use this as well. Off is the same to me as NOT On.
If there was something that supported this that had multiple settings, then I could see it being useful as it would eliminate needing to use an OR statement (such as for music player - NOT playing could replace using the statement paused or stopped)

1 Like