Extra states

[VPelt]

I would like the state 'at home' to rooms to indicate someone is somewhere in the house

This way i can pre-heat and/or turn certain lights on if someone is occupied.

For some rooms i have now a workaround that has a occupancy sensor if someone is at home. But it really doesn't reflect what i want. Also then i can't differentiate between 'night lights' vs heating. e.g. i want a nightlight/task light turn on if someone is at home but not the overhead lights untill the room is actually occupied.

[tbrasser]

Somehow it feels the meta area states can be used for this.

[jseidl]

OK there are several points here so I'm going to tackle each of them.

I would like the state 'at home' to rooms to indicate someone is somewhere in the house

States are related to the area so areas are unlikely to have states that are not related to them directly. There is an FR for allowing "include entities" on meta-areas and that should enable you to add your device trackers to the "Global" meta area. Areas being occupied and "being at home" sound like the same, in practice.

i want a nightlight/task light turn on if someone is at home but not the overhead lights until the room is actually occupied.

Currently light control will not turn lights on unoccupied rooms, but there's another FR for that which I already upvoted because I want that too for my porch lights. This requires me to basically rework the entire light group feature but it would still be cool anyway.

The catch is that those "ambient lights" (like my porch lights) will come on regardless if you're at home or not, just given that the area is dark. After the "Allow include entities on meta-areas" feature is implemented, an update to the ambient lights feature saying "require Global to be occupied" could be massaged in.

This way i can pre-heat

The whole Climate Group things is a mess tbh, I'm considering splitting into a "Fan Groups" and a "Thermostat Control" module, where the latter would be added to a Floor meta-area and allow you to map the Floor Meta-area states (clear, occupied, extended, sleep) to presets. This way you could add the device trackers to the floor meta-area via "include entities" which would cause "Global" to be occupied when those device trackers are detected and do the work for lights, while the Thermostat Control module would change the preset to "pre-heat" or something. After the floor goes into extended state the preset could be changed to, say, "home" and finish heating up. After you leave the house the Floor meta-area would eventually clear and flip the thermostat to "away".

How does that sound?

[VPelt]

The problem isn't to add entities to the global meta area. Currently the only two states i can select for a room to turn on lights are "occupied" or "extended". However i want a room to turn the lights on whenever any room in the house is occupied without marking that specific room as occupied themself.

So instead of just having a clear/dark state. I would propose to loop in the global states. E.g. a room could be

• occupied
• interior (but not room) occupied
• cleared

this is separate from "allow include entities on meta-areas" in that this would work with just a set of rooms. Maybe you want to include your porch lights only if you are actually sitting in your living room (so you can see your porch ligts being on) but not when you are not at home at all.

i also agree that spliting climate in a fan groups and thermostat control would be a good idea. But this idea is limited to extending the state machine of a room and then building features on top of the (extended) statemachine.

That said. Even adding "cleared" to the options for light or thermostat control i think would be a good idea (then i can turn on a light whenever a room isn't occupied. How and when people use that is entirely up to them). Maybe i want my front door lights only to turn on whenever i'm away.

[jseidl]

Hey, did the rework of climate groups solved the climate part of it? Just circling back on this.

I'm planning a feature for "ambient lights" which pretty much is a light group that is on if it's dark regardless if the room is occupied. I understand that would solve part of your problem but not the "is there someone in the house" condition.

Currently MA doesn't care about people (Person entities, not that it's insensitive :D) only room states. Cross-dependency on other areas (e.g. a regular area having to check global area) is kinda messy (race conditions) with the async nature of the code, I need to think more about on how that would work out.