- Hey Hubitat users, if you are new
to the Hubitat Elevation Hub or heck,
if you've even been around it for a little while,
this video is for you.
Hubitat recently provided you
with a simpler way to automate.
In truth much of this has already been there,
and it may have just been renamed
or exposed in a slightly different way.
So, here it is, four places that you can automate
before you get into Rule Machine.
Stay tuned.
(electronic music)
Hi again, John Stone, the DIY Smart Home Guy.
Hubitat Rule Machine can be a daunting endeavor.
While Rule Machine isn't as hard as it looks,
there are times when it is best if you just
try starting with something else.
Today we are going to talk about
four places in Hubitat that you should
become familiar with before
you try an automation in Hubitat.
There are motion lighting apps, simple lighting rules,
groups and scenes and button controllers,
so let's get into it.
And by the way, if you are looking for more help,
Hubitat makes great tutorial videos as well.
The Hubitat video front man is Pete Borchers
and he's a pretty funny guy.
In fact, he's a comedian.
- But anyway, to me minivans
are kinda like sweatpants, all right?
(crowd laughing)
Yeah, like, from the outside it looks like
you've given up on life.
(crowd laughing)
- There's a link below, you can check him out
and give him some love.
When it comes to accessing these apps
it's important to remember that they do not
come pre-activated on your Hub.
That means that you will need to go
into your apps page and install them.
(bell ringing)
First up is the Hubitat Motion Lighting app,
which is more powerful than it sounds.
My garage lights, for example, start off pretty simple
in that I have my garage motion sensor
detecting for movement in the garage.
(gentle music)
When motion is detected it turns on
my main garage light and my workshop light.
It's pretty simple, but there is
more fun to be had.
The third panel on the screen are Options
to Activate, Disable and Enable Lights On.
Here you'll see oodles of additional options
for controlling your lights, like buttons
to turn on lights, buttons to disable
turning the lights on or off,
and contact sensors that can also turn the lights on.
I'll use my garage door open contact
and my garage entry contact to turn on
the lights as well.
To turn the lights off automatically
we'll open that fourth panel,
which is Options for Additional Sensors,
Lights Off and Off Options.
Here I set the minutes to delay
before the off to one minute.
This delay time will vary based on the
reset interval of the motion detector
so don't expect the light to turn off
exactly after one minute.
And you should be sure to check out
all the additional options under those panels
for more great ideas.
For you Wink users this is much like a Wink robot,
only a bit more powerful.
For you older Hubitat users, this is really
just the Simple Lighting app renamed.
In this example we'll turn on this Inovelli LZW30
Red Series on/off switch any time the
Yale Assure SL lock is unlocked.
(motor buzzing)
From here you have an option to automatically
turn the light off after a specified period of time.
You can also add additional restrictions
which include between certain times,
days of the week or modes.
There's also options for illuminance settings.
You also have the ability
to disable certain automation rules
by checking the on/off states of certain other switches.
For example, in my rule to turn the light off
when the door is locked, I set up
a restriction to say if the Inovelli dimmer is on,
don't turn off the light.
This uses the switch to disable that simple automation rule.
Groups are a great way to have many lights
and/or switches to act as a single device.
Grouping devices together will allow you
to turn them on and off together with one command.
For example, I have this group called Living Room
that controls four lights that can be
turned off with a single switch.
Any time you make a group, Hubitat automatically
adds it to the device list.
This allows you to add the group to a dashboard
or you can open it up in your voice assistant skill
for voice control.
And since it's on your device list you can also
control it from the smart lighting app.
Chalupa, turn the living room lights on.
(upbeat music)
(snickering) Chalupa.
That was funny.
A Scene, on the other hand, is a pre-set
configuration for one or more lights
and/or switches.
For example, my colored studio lights
are a pre-set scene and that sets each light
to its predefined color.
To make a scene, simply pick the bulbs, dimmers
or switches that you want to include in the scene,
then open the Adjust Scene Settings panel
to specify what you want each device to do
when that scene is activated.
Another option is to have all of the devices
set exactly how you want them and use
this capture button.
That will automatically save the current setting
of each one of the devices.
Now there have been certain occasions
that it may not correctly capture
the off state of a particular device or switch,
so you may need to go in and manually set that
under the Adjust Scene Settings panel.
There's also a nice feature called Scene Transitions
that gradually allows you to morph one scene
into another scene.
In this example, my Studio Transition Fun One scene
creates a red, green, blue spectrum of light
using my four studio color bulbs.
Studio Transition Fun Two reverses that spectrum.
(upbeat music)
You can then create a scene transition to morph
Scene One into Scene Two.
The transition time on this setup page
is how long the entire transition will take
from beginning to end.
In this case for the demonstration, I'm using 60 seconds.
The transition interval is how often
the lights update as they move across that spectrum.
Shorter interval seconds will create a smoother transition.
I also use scene transitions for my living room lights,
I've talked about this before, using a total
of five transitions between sunset colors,
where each transition can take a total of 10 minutes.
This provides an in-house sunset that takes
an overall 50 minutes to complete.
The last home automation helper that we will discuss
is the Hubitat Button Controller.
(perky music)
With Button Controller you simply
give the controller a name...
(perky music)
And I also like to select the
Keep Button List Sorted option.
Then select the button device.
In my case it's this Lutron Pico remote.
(perky music)
That will control an AC unit in my sun room.
Once you make your selections you can pick
which button event you want to pre-fill
into your control list.
I'm using only the Pushed event.
You can also pre-fill the other available options
like Held and Released if need be.
Then it's really as simple as telling the Hubitat
what you want to do.
(perky music)
I'm going to turn the AC switch on with Button One
and off with Button Five.
(perky music)
You can basically control anything from a button
just like you can from Rule Machine
or another automation.
The only thing you can't do is conditional logic.
If you want conditional logic,
then you'll need to go over to Rule Machine.
I hope that helped you get started
with your home automation ideas.
As you can see, you really don't need to dive
straight into Rule Machine.
With that, don't forget to subscribe
and don't forget to click Like.
Over here are a couple of videos
that I made just for you.
Until next time, cheers.