Scenes, LUA and control states

One of the things I have been thinking of (a lot) recently is the limits of scenes. Say I would go on vacation and want to make my house look like someone is at home, I would have to code a lot of timers and events that will only be valid for the periode I am away, I would even have to delete them and recreate them the next time I go away for a longer time.

Another example: I leave for work and know when I will be back home. To save on the energy, I would like to keep the set temprature as low as possible for as long as possible. It is not possible to use a timed event to turn on the heating, since you do not know the outdoor temperature, the house and the the heating is a closed loop control system with the outdoor temperature (and possible wind) as a noise source. To achive this you need to have a program runnig (Lua script).

So what I propose is that Vera implements what I call global and local (for a room) control states, which activates programs (again Lua), that is active while that control state is active. It must be possible to pass parameters to the control state(or rather to the program) i.e when you activate the vacation control state, you would like to tell it when you will be back so the heating can be turned on again.

I guess we should wait until Lua gets implemented in Vera and see what kind of flexibility it brings…

Well, now they know what I want for the Lua implementation. My intention with the posting was to try to start a discussion here at the forum. I have not read anything about how MCV are thinking about the Lua implementation, and I think that the question raised is relevant for the ones doing the actual implementation.

The full set of commands, parameters, states, etc. are being exposed in the Lua engine, along with command and event interceptors. So you can do essentially anything at all with your Lua code.