Wink introduced a new bot called HomeSitter that makes it look like you are home by turning your lights on and off in a natural pattern.
What is the best Smart Things equivalent of that app ?
I use the SmartApp “Vacation Lighting Director” to accomplish this…works well for simulating someone being home. It can be configured to utilize multiple lights, and take into account presence sensors or modes.
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I wrote a webCoRE piston… Not to do things randomly, but to actually turn some lights on / off as I actually would at night. Even turns the tv on for a bit.
I use vacation lighting director as well. It is not perfect though. There are times that it triggers when I did not want it to and other times that it fails to run. What really needs to happen is for someone like Smartthings to figure out a way to monitor what gets turned on when based on our usage patterns and develop an algorithm to run automatically when we have left home. It should be based on sunrise and sunset for lighting so it knows that if it is daylight then there is no need to turn on a light but it should also recognize lux settings so if it is a really cloudy day or rainy that it triggers a light based on that lux setting using something like a bloomsky. This type of learning and AI behavior is the next thing in automation and the first one to do it right will likely prevail in the market.