Best method to add a vacation schedule (i.e. a lot of devices/times/days)

Other Devices & Integrations Lighting & Load Control
#1

Hello,

I tried looking for this but was not that successful.

I am converting over to a Veralite and want to setup a vacation schedule. My old setup was each day of the week had its unique programming with six lights. Some lights would turn on/off multiple times per night. My preference would be to create a “script” with the entire schedule that I could just run but not sure if that is possible (the scripting info I looked at appeared to be a script to a scene and not one master script). If that is not possible it appears each scene can have multiple schedules which is fine but for each schedule can a duration be entered that would turn off the light instead of having to go into the light off scene and specify the time to turn it off? Thought I saw an older tutorial showing delays doing this but in the new ui it appears delay is just to delay the start time. Not sure if PLEG or any other plug in simplifies what I am trying to do.

Thanks

Jay

#2

A lot of users use Virtual Switches to do these things. Its is a little bit of work to set up, but works great.

I have several virtual switches that I use: Away (indicates if I am home or not), Vacation (indicates I am away for at least overnight or longer), Work (indicates if tomorrow is a work day or sleep in day), and Manual (indicates to stop all timed events, useful for special occasions such as a party).

You can find out how to utilize Virtual Switches by looking at the “Conditional Scenes” thread in the Programming/Scripting section.

I do not use it, but I highly suspect that the PLEG plugin may also have logic to handle vacation programming.

#3

Thanks for the reply.

What I am really looking for is the most efficient way to handle multiple schedules for devices. For instance I have a light that I want the following schedule (different each day of the week):
Mon - 8:45PM on, 9:05PM off, 10:25PM on, 11:15PM off
Tues - 7:50PM on, 9:30PM off
Wed - 8:10PM on, 8:40PM off, 9:50PM on, 10:10PM off
and so on for the rest of the week

From what I have seen I will need to have 2 scenes for this one light: one for on and one for off, where I would schedule all the on times in the on and all the off times in the off scene.

Problem is I have 6 lights that I need to do this with. I know I can take a fair amount of time to go through the UI and setup each device like I described above, but I would really like to create one “script” file containing all of the setups for the 6 lights that I could quickly edit if I need to make changes (and then run/save/load the one script file to load all the scenes).

If that is not possible is there a way to enter a start time and stop time (or duration) for a scene? For instance for the scene to turn on light 1 I can enter the time to turn it on then when to turn it off without having to create an “off” scene?

Not sure if the standard interface and/or PLEG does some/all/none of this. Just trying to find the best way to set this up to make it maintainable.

Thanks in advance

#4

You can do this in PLEG … But it will be much less editing when PLEG next Gen is released.
[hr]
With Next Gen …

  1. You create a Schedule (On time and Off time, Random offsets for ON and OFF are supported)
    (A couple of mouse clicks and a little typing)
  2. You create an Action and attach it to the “ON” time of the schedule (You can’t do this in the current version of PLEG)
    (A couple of mouse clicks and a little typing)
  3. You can attach the SAME action to the “OFF” time of the schedule (You can’t do this in the current version of PLEG)
    (A couple of mouse clicks)
  4. Set the action to set the state of the select light(s) to the same states as the schedule (i.e. ON at the ON time, OFF at the OFF time)
    (A couple of mouse clicks and a little typing)

NOTE: You will not need ANY conditions!
[hr]
You will then be able to export this as a template … and re-import this and bind to a new light, just change the schedule … and repeat for as many times as you want.

#5

That appears to be exactly what I am looking for. When is the Next Gen supposed to be released?

#6

I will probably release for steps 1 - 4 next week.
I will not have the template capability in that release. So you will have to manually create the schedules and actions.

You can install now and get familiar with PLEG.