How would you create a realistic room-to-room presence simulation in Aqara Home?

I’d like to build an Away/Vacation Mode in Aqara Home, but rather than just turning individual lights on and off at random times, I’d like the house to tell a somewhat believable “story.”

For example:

19:10 – living room lights turn on
20:35 – hallway light turns on
20:37 – bathroom light turns on
20:48 – bathroom turns off
20:50 – hallway turns off
22:15 – hallway briefly turns on again
22:17 – bedroom light turns on
22:30 – living room turns off
23:10 – bedroom turns off

In other words, instead of every device behaving independently, the lights would sometimes follow a logical room-to-room sequence that looks more like a person actually moving through the home.

Obviously I wouldn’t want exactly the same sequence every evening either.

Has anyone attempted something like this with Aqara Home Automation 2.0?

I’m particularly curious about:

  • creating several different evening “patterns” and choosing between them
  • adding some randomness to delays without making the sequence completely random
  • triggering the sequence relative to sunset rather than only at fixed clock times
  • occasionally skipping some actions so every evening isn’t identical
  • keeping the whole setup manageable instead of ending up with dozens of automations

Maybe I’m overthinking presence simulation, but to me a logical sequence seems much more natural than several unrelated lights switching on and off independently.

How would you build this using only native Aqara Home features?

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Honestly, this might be too complex for Aqara automations. You could create a lot of automations on a schedule, but there is no randomization factor to do this. If you’re using Alexa it has a built in Away mode that does this now. Or if you have access to Home Assistant or Homey you can build a script to do it.

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There are some pretty clever integrations available for Home Assistant, like this one:

The integration records the behavior of the assigned entities (e.g., a lamp or a TV) for X days, and while you’re on vacation, the entities do exactly what you did during those X days (with an adjustable time delay).

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