How did you automate the lights with motion sensors and handle override behavior?

I’ve bought a whole lot of Aquara motion sensors. The idea is to automate all the (Mi light) lights in the room, eliminating the need for pushing any light buttons. Probably some overall mood lighting for the whole room, and bright light for the area I’m moving in like the kitchen, or computer desk.

But I do want the option to override the automatic lights like when we watch movies with a projector. I have also Aquara switches I want to use to override the automatic switching.

What would be the most convenient behavior? After pressing a override button to switch on (or off) the lights do you start a timer to enable the motion activation after a period of time? Or maybe reset everything to motion activation after night? Maybe I should implement three stages of button pressing: On, off, motion activated.

I like to know if anyone else tried to completely automate the lights. And how did you handle the override behaviour. Maybe I want to make things too fancy, and it might end up in way more irritation than convenience.

A possibility might be to override the normal behavior by A) setting the desired levels AND B) disabling the automation flows with the button. If the automated flows are disabled then the lights won’t be managed by the sensors anymore until you re-enable these flows.
You can then reinstate the automation by enabling the flows again with a double click of the button for instance.

I use the app sets and set states of moods that are activated by some flows. You can do it with a Boolean variable (or a virtual device mode switch or better logic) if it’s just one.

Then each of my flow will check that the mood sets are off to activate the automation.
I use sets only because I have different mood set for netflix, hue party or sleep and each state in the mood set has some other flows checking for them to activate some other stuff…

I would do it on a device by device basis, basically turning each ‘switch’ from binary (on/off) to ternary (on/off/auto).

On and Off work normally, when manually set the device is now on/off.
When a device is set to ‘auto’ it will turn itself on/off based upon motion/contact/sensors whatever.

In order to change the device from on/off to ‘auto’, I personally would use a couple of ways :

  1. It can be set in the Homey app.
  2. If the the fibaro swtich is ’ double clicked’ set the light back to auto.

Then as I got a better understanding over several weeks of how everthing is working (or not)I might then choose flows which also set it to auto on depending on which device and how well the system is working. ie.

  • The pantry might go back to auto after no motion for 2 hours
  • The lounge might be set back to auto at 3am each night
  • The bathroom has auto turned on every day at 11am then off again at 6pm.
  • No flows for the bedroom, it can only be set back to auto manually.

Thanks for the input and suggestions everyone!