Temporary disabling of devices?

Is there any way to temporarily disable devices?
If not, well there is my feature request.

Outages are your best option! But they are all gone! You so missed the party!

Explain a little of what you’re trying to do please.

I’m trying to disable the device, as in taking it out of service.

Deleting all smartapps to stop everything (and later having to add and configure them again) is awfully kludgy.

Hey Twack…

Enable/Disable flags have existed in HA for years. Switches, schedules, sensors, even rules or scenes. It can be a very powerful feature to simplify rule making. Here is a simple scenario:

You have a motion sensor that performs a group of actions when you enter a room, but you don’t want them repeatedly performed while you are occupying that room, so you add an action to that group that disables that motion sensor.

When another sensor triggers to indicate you have left the room, you re-enable the aforementioned motion sensor.

And one of my real world scenarios:
I open the shower door and the light comes on, changes from blue to orange when enough time has elapsed for hot water to reach the shower, blinks the light when it’s time to “wind things up to conserve water”, and turns on the vanity light for ten minutes.

I don’t want this all triggered again when I open the door to exit the shower, so after the actions are queued up on the initial door opening, I disable that sensor for 10 minutes.

HTH

Nah, that’s so 80-s. It’s brave new world of HA 2.0 where you have to write 200 lines of Groovy code running in the “cloud” on the other side of the continent to accomplish essentially the same thing. :slight_smile:

Enable/Disable is easily implemented in ST. For anything you want to have that capability, use a virtual device to launch an app, where the virtual device stands in for the device normally involved. The app implements whatever logic you want wrt whatever enable/disable means. The UI can be as simple as On/Off with a tile, or whatever.

I don’t think we share the same definition of “easy”. :smile:

I want all devices to have that capability by default. The smartapp situation is messy enough as is without adding yet another kludge.

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It seems to me that smartapps are in fact the primary method of implementing the control and automation that people want. If you think that’s a kludge you’re probably on the wrong platform. ST has given us an incredibly powerful set of tools (if/when they actually work, unlike today), and smartapps are essential elements.

I think it would be a mistake to go down a path of loading more app-like functionality onto devices – Where do you stop? Which functions are most important? Do you really need to be able to disable every device? A smartapp to disable a device is essentially trivial, if that’s all you want to do. But what is cool is that more refinement of what “disable” means, under what conditions, for how long, etc., is available through a smartapp, and couldn’t be done with just a disable switch as part of a device.

I don’t think anything is easily implemented in ST, maybe short of the stock capabilities, and even then the convoluted interface and disparity of what apps you have installed that are visible (and others not) is a cluster at best. There is no IAC, no definable global states, no autonomy of device capabilities. It is like a Lego set of the sixties where you had rectangular blocks and square blocks; pretty tough to build an arch with those.

What you’re suggesting is an obtuse workaround to something that should have been better thought out in the first place. While the platform is indeed clever, I think much of the forest was missed for the trees; that being how home automation works in general. Timed lights and simple motion sensed actions are not home automation, and can be accomplished without anything smart. Smart is about complex interactions and capabilities and what we currently have is not very smart in those regards.

One could argue “yeah, you can do it”… but not in any way I would consider “smart”.

One person’s obtuse workaround in another’s clever code. HaHa.

You’re right that how to make ST play like a good orchestra is far from obvious. It seems like working on getting the very first orchestra seated in a way that works, when no one has ever seen or heard an orchestra before. At this point, there is no orchestra, only a bunch of instruments playing pretty much out of tune and out of sync. Oh, but we could get it to be a great orchestra if only…

All of this is moot if ST can’t get this platform to be dependable. My wife is about to insist that I remove things so it doesn’t drive her crazy anymore. Silence from ST sure doesn’t help.

Yes unfortunately ST really needs to go back to the drawing board and redo system design again … in my humble opinion.

Yeah, this has been bread and butter of home automation since the 70-s. It worked like a clockwork, locally, not relying on Internet, AWS, Java, etc. I’m all for the new technologies as long as they make things easier and work better and, not the opposite. What we have instead is an extremely complex “smart” system that can, theoretically, implement very complex rules (if you know how to program it), but which lacks basic stability, reliability and robustness of the “dumb” home automation that is absolutely essential for it to be practically useful. [end rant :smile: ]

So did anyone have an answer.
I too just want to just Stop everything temporarily

I guess I could unplug the hub!

But I want an option in the phone app!