WTH can't i use room activity as automation triggers

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

It would be nice to use room activity as triggers rather than devices or entities.

Currently if a room has multiple sensors (like motion, door, etc.), you have to define them all as possible triggers. It would be nicer to define room activity as triggers.

2

Agreed, that would be nice to do from the GUI. Kind of like the way you can assign multiple trackers to a person and then use the person for triggers. In the meantime, you can do it with a template sensor like this:

- binary_sensor:
  - name: Kitchen Occupied
    icon: mdi:stove
    state: >- 
      {{ ((is_state('binary_sensor.kitchen_presence_kitchen', 'on') or
         is_state('binary_sensor.house_door_contact', 'on')) and
         is_state('input_boolean.disable_occupancy', 'off')) or
         is_state('input_boolean.occupancy_override', 'on')
      }}

In this one, if the front door is open or the kitchen presence sensor is sensing something, then the kitchen is occupied. The last two are “overrides” I have that let me either turn every light on in the house (by using occupancy override to make every room think someone is in it) or disable all the presence sensing altogether (i.e. turn the house dumb again) using disable occupancy.

3

Alternatively you could use a group or perhaps a label template as discussed below:

4

You can also vote for my WTH Trigger automation by label to make triggering with label simple to do.

5

Yes, this is a huge miss from what other platforms offer. In Homey, if I add an occupancy sensor or a device that has one ( like a camera ) to a room and it triggers, the room is occupied. Being able to just add a new light and place it in an area and have automations work etc is huge, but for some reason this doesn’t work with occupancy sensors yet.

Rooms/Areas are occupied/not occupied. Sensors are not, they just convey that information about occupancy. It makes sense to bubble that information up to the room so that the room itself can have an occupied/not occupied state, and any sensor within the room can trigger that state. Why is this useful? Because I have cameras in some rooms, z-wave motion sensors in others, ecobee-based temp sensors in others etc and having to modify all my automations and ID’s in them when anything changes there is a huge pain.

1 Like