Hi Guys, I have today tried to create a holiday timer to turn certain lights on and off during hours of darkness whilst I am away.
I would have thought this a simple task for Vera and had hoped there would have been a simple menu but I have ended up creating a multitude of differeing timers that I am having to manually fire off through the dashboard.
There has to be an easier way than this, is there a timer module for this that I am missing as this is what I thought Vera would excel at.
Simon - by holiday timer, I assume that you mean to while you are away on holiday (vacation here in the states.) There has been much talk about vacation settings on the boards, and the best solution is to have “home” and “away” settings that you enable or disable through the dashboard. To my knowledge, there has not been anything short of writing scripts to go beyond this basic control.
I would suggest searching for “vacation” and you’ll see what I mean.
There are several ways to accomplish what you want.
The simplest way (without code) is to create an on and an off scene and lots of timers to run on certain days and times.
Taking it a step further, add a Virtual Switch, add return luup.is_night() and a bit of code to monitor the Virtual Switches state and only run those scenes when you are away and it’s night.