I’ve been using a motion sensor with conditions like Sunset and Lux as conditions, works fairly well so far. However I tried playing with seeing colour and level at the turn on which again worked well, until I adjusted the light level that is. Soon realised that the rule was obviously continuously running and attempting to switch on the lights all through the evening, which seems very inefficient but my main issue now is I can’t adjust the lights without the rule over writing that user setting.
So in my lounge lights come on as it starts to get dark, all good. Later as I want to either watch a film or just relax and therefore turn the light level down, the rule runs as I move and sets the lights back.
I have seen that the ‘Run once a day’ switch was removed from Smart Lights fairly recently and perhaps this might of helped.
I can’t find a setting that states only run if off. Am I missing something or is this the limitation of ST apps and their lack of conditions? Do I need to be looking at CoRE? Seems a bit fundamental to me and this can’t be a unique situation, a mate has a very similar issue with setting levels with his Sonos via ST, needs to only set the level if it was off.
Hope this makes sense and I haven’t missed anything previously asked.
We’re in the same boat.I have the same issue in my family room. I have my harmony hub set to dim the lights when we start a movie, but when ST detects motion, it turns on the lights full blast (as I have it set to do in evening mode with motion). This has been a mild aggravation, but I haven’t found a way to avoid it without writing better rules in CoRE (as you rightly suggest) and removing the stock ST triggers. Like you, I try to use the stock ST functions when available, but I don’t think it can handle this at present.
These are override situations where you have an existing rule but you want to add an additional condition that limits when it fires.
People use to write custom code for this, particularly for motion sensors because they would have a problem where they would turn the switch on on the wall and then the motion sensor would turn the light off before they wanted it off.
Now it’s easiest to just use core, which is a very sophisticated community – created rules engine. It has many different layers of stacked conditionals.
Core calls its individual rules “pistons.” if you ask in the peer assistance thread for core there are lots of people who can help you set up a piston for any specific situation.
If you happen to have an iOS device, there’s also a very nice app you can get from the app store for about $10 called smart rules. It’s much easier to use than core, but doesn’t have as many levels. Like CoRE, It does have a “while” condition which the official features don’t. There’s no android version for it yet though.
A lot of people use both core and smart rules. They use core for the really complicated stuff and smart rules for the simple stuff. Just depends on your own preferences. But again you have to have an iOS device to use smart rules.
So I can now set conditions and stop the rules overwriting my manual settings, one box ticked. I can’t set the colour of the Hue bulbs though so it will only set a dimmer brightness of the last colour, doh. One step forwards, one step back, lol
I know this is old, but it still is an issue. I don’t understand why they haven’t updated the smartlights to accommodate for this. Seems like a simple addition that many could use. I’ve been using smartthings since May and I’m a little disappointed at the lack of additions to make it more usable without extra add-ons.
Well, you can either continue to wait, which might be a very long time, or you can adapt and install something like webCoRE so that you can gain the additional enhanced functionality that you desire.
It’s easier than you think after you have done some reading and understand what it is and what it does and can do.
