I have a lot of regular occurring automations and some of them can be annoying if they fire when an unusual event is happening.
It would be nice to have the option to skip x executions of an automation or pause an automation during a period of time.
Having a party? Maybe skip the auto locking of doors and sprinklers from running?
Have you fed your cat a treat? Pause or skip the next auto feeding as they will not be hungry.
Door alarms arm at a specific time? disable it temporarily for a short time
Main idea would be that this is a easy action to perform on an automation so that it could be done via voice or very quickly via chat with assist.
Obviously you can go in and toggle one of these automations OFF and then hopefully remember to turn them back on later, but the idea here is a small time or count of skips to create a short term change without needed configuration.
Edit:
Further clarification on cases based on a voice commandā¦
Until:
Disable the sprinkler automation until midnight.
Skip:
Skip the next cat feeding automation. (IE the next time the automation would succeed it would just be ignored)
Between:
Disable the door auto lock automation between 7PM and 1AM tonight.
A lot of my automations have an associated input_boolean and a condition so that they only run if it is āonā. Then you can disable them with a switch on a dashboard.
You dont need this. Every automation has an associated on/off switch effectively. You can add that to dashboard.
Problem is when you only want to temporarily disable it or temporarily enable it. There is no built no mechanism for this and when you forget it can create an issue. In the future I may add a condition that disables or enables running with a associated timer and actionable notification that asks me if I want to enable/disable. But it would be nice if these were built in.
EXAMPLE
I have a gate
I have a motion sensor at gate
When I have parties I set gate to open when motion is sensed. Works great.
Problem is, I always forget to turn it off after parties over and find some random person who decides to turn around using my driveway opening the gate. Considering this is almost the only thing keeping people form walking through my unlocked front door, I need to make sure I turn this off when not needed.
Do you need the helper for that? You can simply make a button or tile card for the automation entity. The default ātoggleā behavior will enable or disable the automation.
The helper can be used for other stuff too of course, but if you simply want a shortcut to turn an automation on and off its there already.
Turning it off for a limited period of time is not possible right now without extra effort. . You could write a script or automation for that, which would be very short, and you could use long press of the button to activate it. If you want configurable time it would also need a helper to be created for that (either timer or datetime)
Isnāt this what is being asked for, the extra effort to make it better so scripts and automatons to make it work arent needed?
I plan to add this as condition based action in automations that I turn ON/OFF for limited time periods but having it built would make it better/easier.
Having it run enabled dynamically by voice is definitely needed
Yes, thatās how I interpreted it as well. I was just reacting to @jackjourneyman and clarifying that the desired functionality is attainable right now, it may be more work but if you really want it the time gained wrt waiting for this to be implemented may be worth it.
The on/off switch disables the automation. With an input_boolean it still runs, but does nothing. Not sure itās a good idea to routinely disable automations - Iāve only ever used that for testing.
What do you expect HA to do about your absent mindedness?
If you use a helper in the condition block to stop an automation, you will know from the log that it was triggered. If you disable an automation you have no way of knowing whether it would have been triggered or not. Troubleshooting will be based on assumptions - and that ends in tears.
I use separate automations that can be controlled by voice to toggle automations on and off. So, āAlexa, Iāll be outsideā turns on an input bullion that turns off the automation that locks the doors after 5 minuets. Two hours later it turns the auto locking automation back on. Alexa can also turn things on or off in the future. You can say āturn off (whatever your automation is called)ā then say āturn on ( ) at 10 PMā.
If you use something else for voice, some of this may or may not work.
