I’m far from expert, but it seems sometimes the service homeassistant.turn_on works when light.turn_on doesn’t.
For me they tend to work interchangeably, but I’ve seen others comment on it.
Thank you. I figured it out this morning. When I was recreating the svc node i missed checking the render templates in Data button! That fixed it for me! I think I have it working now.
I will need to adjust the timer to 20 minutes. but fingers crossed this works as expected.
Hi guys can these flows work if the light was turned on from the front end/lovelace instead of a physical switch, I use hue and milight bulbs and tablets on the wall for switching them on and off and with alexa most of the time. My kids room did not have neutral at the switch and in my living room and family room i chose the milight cause they were cheap but worked just fine for me.
1 Like
I’ve taken a different approach, when motion is detected I pull the status of the light before doing anything, if it’s off I continue other wise I halt. I turn on light and delay 3 minutes and then pull status of motion sensor, if still motion I loop back to input of 3min delay and when no motion I turn lights off.
It doesn’t have the switch override but will not turn light off when it was on before motion was detected and will not turn off if there are still people in hallway.
I don’t mind of the switch override and this way I can keep all in one nice sequence without hassle of variables
can you post the flow so i can see it please.
This is the flow. This is actually a more complicated version as I have 2 sensor in the hallway and want to avoid double triggers. So the rate limit in the beginning is not needed, needer is the sequential status check at the end.
This is also using Openhab to get the trigger but you can easily replace the Openhab nodes with the equivalent HA nodes.
I’m confused (sorry!), how is one able to tell when a light was turned on from the physical real world light switch? Is there a state that HA is reporting that I have been missing? This would be huge for WAF
If you compare the user_id between HA calling the event or a physical user there is one difference.
The user on physical is null
This is an option to tell the difference.
Very interesting, what version do you need to be on? Where do you see the user who called the service? I checked some of my switch state attributes, and user_id wasn’t listed as one
Edit: Do you need the websockets fork of Node-Red?
Check for a state change and look at the full msg payload for
data.event.new_state.context.user_id
Test it with a physical switch and a virtual to see if there is a difference.
@onkytonk This is great work. I have been looking for something like this for ages.
Would you be able to share your Booleans with me. Trying to work out what they are doing as part of this flow.
I also am learning more and more about Node Red and finding it much better as I learn more
Well done and thanks.
Bruce
Can you send me the boolean code and where to put it… Ive never made a boolean input and not understanding where they go . .
thx
R
Just for future reference, I tried this system and it worked well, but I moved it to this solution that I found was more robust.
2 Likes
Hi,
i just tried to use your flow , but node-red giving me error on some points 
" " } that kind of errors…
do you know how i can solve this?
hope to hear from you
That could be a formating issue with the quotation marks. They should be like this: " " and not like this: “ ”
But i see that you already found an updated node flow for this. Let me know if there are any more issues.
Did you get this working. I have just implemented and it’s working. I can help you if you need help.
Hey Tom thanks for your reply,
No I never did get it working , I think I was missing the Boolean code to get it to work… Can you share?
R
Hey there,
Sorry I’ve been MIA for a while as I haven’t been using HA, as we’ve been waiting for our new home to be built.
I haven’t yet re-implemented this automation, but from memory, it would have utilised these input booleans.
light_manually_on:
name: Check if lights were on manually
initial: off
icon: mdi:lightbulb-on-outline
light_on_by_automation:
name: Check if lights were on by automation
initial: off
icon: mdi:lightbulb-on-outline
Hope that helps for now.
Hey Rene see if this info helps you get your head around the use of the boolean,
Booleans proper name in home assistant is input_boolean and we can create them and use them as virtual switches that we can physically add to the dashboard (they appear/act as entities as seen below pic) and turn on and off or we don’t have to display them we can still use automations like node red to change their state to on or off like what’s been done in the above mentions.
To create an input_boolean you need to do it in the configuration.yaml file.
or if you want to get fancy and keep you config yaml file clean then you can create a separate .yaml file placing it anywhere but good place would be in the includes folder. You can call the file whatever name you want but for best practice call it boolean.yaml or input_boolean.yaml so you know what the file has in it.
Here you can see I have decided to create a file and use the include function in configuration.yaml file to reference the file.
Once you have your blank boolean yaml file in your includes folder you need to start declaring/making some booleans so we can reference them in NodeRed. You will notice each boolean starts 2 spaces out and not directly on the left, this is because in the config file we typed input_boolean: already so it’s as though this code is just a continuation of what you started in the config file under includes. Don’t forget any changes you make to files in the file editor area you need to restart HA click on the gear icon and restartHASS.
#################################################################
# #
# Booleans Sensors #
# #
#################################################################
dining_light_manual:
name: Dining light manual
initial: off
dining_light_auto:
name: Dining light auto
initial: off
front_light_manual:
name: Front light manual
initial: off
front_light_auto:
name: Front light auto
initial: off
Note one thing I can’t work out when it comes to NodeRed is the quickest restart method after making file changes to see then in nodered eg I create a new input boolean and then want to use that input boolean often it doesn’t show up straight away, restartHASS will see changes in HA but nodered doesn’t seem to pickup on the changes maybe because it runs side by side with HA and is not part of HA as such. I have found sometimes in order to see something like a new boolean I added in a file in NodeRed straight way I need to shut down home assistant and boot up again. Not sure if anyone can clarify better on this?
Here is mine based on state machine, I found this example in reddit (dont have the link now) and i customised it according to my needs.
The link in and out sensor are also used to turn the state machine to steady state (off in which case). This is triggered from my bed sensor when i go to bed, so that the switch override is no more active at night and motion detection can turn the lights on.
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``` 