I am trying to coordinate certain scenes with certain events. For the most part these are events that are calendar based. My biggest "want’ is to have scenes (and groups of scenes) triggered on days that I work.
As a simple example, on days that I work, I want my zwave wallplug to turn the coffee on at 5AM, off at 7AM, and yard lights on at 11PM and off at midnight.
All fairly simple tasks. The problem is that my work schedule is not predictable and regular. I keep my master work schedule on Google Calendar.
What I don’t want to have to do is every week go into vera and program in a new schedule in the timer section. Too much work. Seems thats the kind of thing they make automation to do, and the reason I bought a “home automation” system, ie Vera.
Problem is I can see no way to do this, short of finding a Luup module to read my calendar on google. None exists sadly.
My next thought would be setting a “flag” on work days., then on days that I work (set in the timer section), a software variable “flag” would be set, I’d have to program the days into vera but at least the scenes could check the workday flag, and if set, the scene would execute.
I don’t see any way to set such a flag in vera, so am here asking if any one has any ideas on how to 1) read an online calendar, or 2) set an event flag that other scenes can be triggered by if set, or 3) any other ideas to accomplish the tasks outlined in this most lengthy of posts.
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your thoughts.
I had a similiar problem. To solve it, I had to resort to LUA programming.
I created a couple of virtual devices on Vera, which I called “Work”, “Night”, “Vacation”, “Manual”, and “Away” (i.e out for the evening). In my vera scenes, I check the status of these virtual devices, and do (or not do) as appropriate.
I also got one of the old Intermatic HA07 scene controllers. They are still available if you search for them, and Wayne Dalton is making new ones as well. I use the scene buttons to activate Vera scenes that set or reset the virtual devices.
Now all I have to do is push the appropriate scene button if tomorrow I go to work (or stay home).
Note that Vera cannot understand the HA07 Scene off buttons (it will turn off lights, but cannot run a specific Vera scene). So I just use multiple presses of a scene button (for example, one push sets the “Away” virtual device, second push sets the “Vacation” virtual device, and a third push resets them both).
Do a forum search on “Virtual Devices”, and you should be able to find programming examples.
Yes, but I didn’t finish it before my vacation, and it’s down the priority list right now. It’s definitely possible, but working with Google’s [non-compliant CalDAV] impl is a bear, so it’s going to take some real energy to complete it (unless I switch to a compliant CalDAV server)
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