I’m setting up a FS20Z-1 to open and close my garage door and my gate. How do I set it so that the device is only triggered for a second at a time.
There are several possibilities:
Use a Vera scene with an immediate action to turn the switch on and a one-second delayed action to turn it back off. The actual switch time will vary according to the loading on Vera and your Z-Wave network. If Vera were to crash/restart while the switch was on, it would not get turned off.
Use Program Logic Event Generator PLEG) to implement the logic with an interval timer. PLEG processes any timers that were running when Vera restarts so should cope with crashes. PLEG will be very useful for your further automation but there is a learning curve. See PLEG Basics.
Use Program Logic Timer Switch (PLTS). This is related to PLEG but designed specifically for timed events. It may be easier to learn if you just want to operate your gate. See PLTS Basics.
The Garage Door plugin may do what you want. See the entry in the App Store.
You can also program delayed events in a scene using Lua/Luup code. See Conditional Scene Execution.