I’ve been talking to someone trying to corral all they have going on. Things are getting to be a mess in their environment. They have a lot of devices, and an environment consisting of ISY, Insteon hub, Alexa, Smartthings. Devices wise they have everything from ip cameras to Sonos speakers, motion sensors, lights, light strips, door locks, open/close sensors, hue lights, fan controllers, etc. (you get the idea).
I demo’d HA to this person. They had originally planned to use CastleOS and I wanted to demo how much better HA is. I think they are a bit concerned about support in HA if I’m not a phone call away. Regardless, if I can do what they want, they will go with whatever works.
My question is… Can the Programs component of ISY be recreated in HA. If you have not seen what I am talking about if is mostly If…Then…Else… statements using states, conditions, devices/components, scenes, and variables to make basically automations. Since all of the devices can be brought into HA, how would one go about recreating the If…Then…Else type scenarios? If motion sensor A on Then lights a, b ,c on for 5 minutes, turn off. That would be something simple. A more complex example might be taking the temperature, and automatically adjusting ceiling fan speed. Like 75-80 degree => fans on low 80-85 => fans on medium… below 60 fans off. You get the idea.
Why do this? You may be asking. Well, this person is finding the Amazon Echo to be a appealing way to adjust the environment. They like the Echo. Since Echo supports Insteon hub, conflicts are now coming about. He can say at dinner ‘dinner lights set to 10 percent’. Then maybe someone walks by a sensor that triggers a program on the ISY and kicks the dinner lights up to 80% for 3 minutes and then turns them off. So what needs to happen is more control centralization and the ability to have a system that is not going against your current wishes.
I have the same issue at home. If I pass a certain indoor ip camera my hallway lights turn on for 3 minutes. Most of the time this is great. But I was working on the stairs and if I turned them on using voice, anyone moving by the camera cause the program to run and in the minutes the lights were off. I’d like to either issue a voice command that will suspend the automated system for a given period, or come up with some way to make this work more smoothly and not work against my needs.
Just wondering what your thoughts are on this matter.
Thanks,
tobias.