Motion-Triggered Lights

Scheduling lights is really easy with the switch actor type. Even associating motion sensors isn’t too complicated with just a single additional schedule rule. The procedure is identical to that used for Open Door or Window Detection, except that the binary_sensor entities now report motion instead of open windows and the value needs to be set to "on" while motion is detected.

Let’s assume the following:

  1. You’ve got a room named entrance configured in Schedy with one or more lights as actors.
  2. There’S a motion sensor binary_sensor.entrance_motion that switches to on when motion is detected.

Ok, let’s get started.

  1. Add a custom motion_room: entrance attribute to the binary_sensor.entrance_motion entity via customize.yaml to tie the motion sensor to the Schedy room it belongs to.

  2. Now, a new rule which overlais the value with "on" while a motion sensor of the current room reports motion is added. We place it at the top of the schedule_prepend configuration section to have it applied to all rooms as their first rule.

    - x: "Mark('on', Mark.OVERLAY) if not is_empty(filter_entities('binary_sensor', motion_room=room_name, state='on')) else Next()"

  3. Add the motion sensor to the watched_entities of the entrance room.

watched_entities:
- "binary_sensor.entrance_motion"

Try it out. As long as at least one of the motion sensors in a room reports motion, the lights in that room should stay on.

If you also had brightness sensors in each room, you could now insert another rule before the one we just added to fix the value to "off" when it’s not dark enough in the particular room.