The following problem: You have visitors and go shopping for a moment. Your apartment or house has an automation using HomeKit that switches off all devices as soon as you leave your home. Your visit is therefore in the worst case in the dark. This need not be. I'll show you how to set up a guest mode.
What do we need?
All we need for this is primarily HomeKit.
In addition, we may need a Smartplug or Homebridge.
How do we set up guest mode?
There are several ways to set up a guest mode. In this example, I implement the whole thing using Homebridge and a stateful dummy switch.
We insert a new dummy switch in Homebridge and give it the "Stateful" property. Stateful ensures that this switch also retains the current value that we pass it in our workflow and does not reset itself.
After restarting Homebridge, it is already available in our HomeKit environment and we can now use it to build our automations or workflows.
Now let's take the above scenario in which we have a visitor at home and leave the apartment briefly ourselves. We have an automation that ensures that all devices (lights, sockets, radiators, etc.) are switched off as soon as we leave our home. Now we use a shortcut to set up the automation so that it no longer works as soon as we activate guest mode.
We can also implement the whole thing with a smart plug. If this is on, the automation does not take effect and the devices remain switched on.
