The Smart Home Project

There are a lot of posts online asking Philips to add functionality to their motion sensors so that they don't turn lights off if a certain activity is happening or the lights were turned on by another means. There are third-party apps (most of which cost money) to add some functionality to allow this, but it can be done for free if you're prepared to send some JSON configuration to the built-in debugging page.  "Wait, that sounds scary and difficult!" I hear you cry, but it is actually very simple... even if you aren't a techie. I'll take you through it step-by-step here, but all you need is a web browser and the ability to paste an edited version of the configuration into a web page and click on a button.  Scenario There are many different scenarios where this can be useful, but I'm going to give you one of my scenarios here to demonstrate the principle. I have some garden lights controlled by a motion sensor and a Hue Button, but I can also set scenes v...

I made the decision that we would use consumer tech in our Smart Home (see this post) and the lighting system we settled on was Philips Hue. I will explain why we went for Philips Hue over other possibilities in another post at some point. However, when using a system like Philips Hue (or any of the others with their own controllers) there is a choice between performing the automation natively in the system controller, doing it within a central control system (like Home Assistant) or some form of hybrid.  In my experience, there is always a slight (but noticeable) delay if trying to perform all the automations within the central controller. I know that some of this comes from the particular platforms that are being integrated, e.g. the Philips Hue integration polls the Hue Bridge rather than accepting push notifications for motion sensors, etc. However, there is a second issue; namely, what happens if my central controller is offline for some reason? If my Home Assistant machine f...