Virtual buttons and Google home

Questions & Help
1

Hello guys,

I need a little help…
Currently, I have a virtual button for each zone in my house. When I turn off the zone, lichts won’t go on with the motion sensors (for example when I’m watching a movie, I don’t want the living room lights to go on). Each button is called like ‘motion sensor living room’ ‘motion sensor kitchen’ etc. The buttons are linked to a logic ‘yes = on, no = off. I can ask Google to’ turn off motion sensor living room’

It works perfectly. Now, I would like or love to have a button to turn on and off all zones. Just to make it work the normal way. For that, I created a flow that turns all rooms to yes and all to no… But here is the problem:

  1. I say: turn on all motion sensors. The button called all motion sensors turns to on (all rooms in logic go to yes)
  2. I turn off the living room and the kitchen (both go to no)
  3. I say : turn on all motion sensors… It won’t work becaise the button ‘all motion sensors’ already is tirn d on.

Edit: making it automatically turn off after one second won’t work as I also want to be able to say: turn off all motion sensors

I d love to hear if anybody can come up with an creative idea :bulb::point_up_2:

2

Before it was possible to start flows from Google Home, I used two virtual buttons, one that was always on to turn it off, and one that was always off to turn it on. Now that favorite flows can be activated from Google Assistant, I deleted all those virtual buttons. I now only use flows. I use Google Routines to add the sentences I like.

1 Like
3

Ah of course. I read something about starting a flow directly. Lemme try, thanks!

4

Hi @Edwin_D,

What’s the difference between the virtual button with the app and the one of homey?

5

Thank you very much. It works perfectly now :ok_hand::ok_hand:

6

I do not use the app myself, but thee virtual buttons in Homey are more basic. The ones for the app offer more variations, but the basic concept is the same. IThey allow you to add devices that are not directly hardware related, and add behaviour via flows.

As I mentioned before, their use of making flows accessible in Google Home is no longer needed, but you can still use them e.g. to control devices via webrequests/ifttt or toggle variables that you use in flows. For that, basic Homey virtual buttons will do just fine.

7

I use virtual lights. I turn them on by voicecommand.
When the lamp is on i use a flow to let it active logic (set someone as sleeping) and i also let the lamp deactivate after 2 minutes. This way i can reactivate again.