Record real world activity for playback as Virtual Occupancy

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

For those who want an OH native way that uses persistence to do this see Presence Simulation - #4 by rlkoshak. There are several tutorials that cover doing this with CalDav as well.

It’s pretty much a one liner Rule.

rule "Simulate lights"
when
    Time cron "0 0/5 * * * ?"
then
    if(PresenceSim.state == ON){
        gLights.members.forEach[light | light.sendCommand(light.historicState(now.minusHours(24*7)).state)]
    }
end

That will replay the light states to whatever they were at this same time one week ago.

@Andrew_Rowe

I read a thread awhile back where the idea was to use light switching pattern gleaned from states pulled from the persistence service. In other words, while you are on vacation, the lights play back the prior week’s switching on and off. Author believed it to be more ‘convincing’ then random pattern.

That was mine. I don’t know that it’s more convincing but it is pretty easy to implement and doesn’t require anything special external beyond persistence which many of us have set up already.

I never turned this into a separate tutorial or DP.

@Syn

Edit: Initial point is here, I think:

Thanks for posting the later topic. I forgot that the approach was refined quite a bit in that thread. That is probably why I never turned it into a tutorial. By the time we get to Dim’s example it was more other people’s code than mine.