Nice work. I’ve tested it with the Combination Switch and it correctly appears as a Security Sensor, tripped during the alarm period and not tripped otherwise.
This plugin is awesome. Just what I needed to clean up a lot if virtual switches and scheduling scenes. Love the icon too.
Bug: gives you the ability to set the wake up time on the first tab, but not the duration.
Change request: although it might seem cool, the built in scene trigger is a bad idea. I highly suggest removing it and just allow scenes to wire up to the triggers. If you need more explanation why, ask and ill explain in detail.
Q: What is the type “Alarm Clock” for in advanced settings? What happens if I change it?
Q: Stop Next: what’s that do really? And then what happens if I hit run after?
Bug: gives you the ability to set the wake up time on the first tab, but not the duration.
It's not really a bug, it's just that in the first ("classic") tab I didn't put all parameters. You must go in "Set Variables" tab to have all features.
Change request: although it might seem cool, the built in scene trigger is a bad idea. I highly suggest removing it and just allow scenes to wire up to the triggers. If you need more explanation why, ask and ill explain in detail.
I don't understand why this could be a problem. You can use this possibility or just use that plugin as a trigger in a scene as usual. I put that for "WAF" purpose : You can choose the scene to trigger without edit that scene.
Q: What is the type "Alarm Clock" for in advanced settings? What happens if I change it?
You do not change parameters in advanced settings but in "Set Variables" tab.
There is two types :
Time : the device is tripped one time and stop
Alarm Clock : it fires every days (and you can bypass a day)
Q: Stop Next: what's that do really? And then what happens if I hit run after? :/
If you are in time mode, if you hit "Stop Next", the device will not be tripped (you can see "timer off"). You then hit run : the device wil tripped at the hour you asked.
If you are in alarm clock mode, it do the same but just one time. For example, you choose the wake-up time at 6:45. The saturday, at 20:00, you hit "Stop Next". The sunday at morning, the device won't tripped. But the monday he will be tripped at 6:45. It just a sort of bypass that resets automatically.
Okay cool. Stop Next is a neat feature. So “Run” is basically the reset button of “Stop Next”?
Counter Intuitive: The days of the week are set to when you want bypass versus when you want active. It’s very unnatural that way IMO. I thought it was broken until I inverted them.
IMO Why you shouldn’t have scenes triggering in the device:
I’ll skip all the obvious stuff and go straight to the non obvious:
Managing anything (triggers) in two places is just bad UI/UX development. In this case you aren’t simply presenting a separate UI for managing all triggers, you are creating a separate place entirely where a scene can be triggered. Although not an issue for everyone, this can create confusion and headache when you have multiple triggers on devices. It also makes it much easier to make a scripting mistake that can cause an infinite loop.
If by chance the scene you had configured gets deleted, the reference to that scene ID is still there and pointing at effectively nothing. Where as if scene triggers were used, they should automatically remove themselves and everything gets cleaned up.
If Vera decides to upgrade the UI and have an easier mechanism for managing triggers (while maintaining backwards compatibility), your feature may become obsolete, problematic, and disconnected from their new scheme.
It’s not needed and goes against the standard way a Vera network is scripted.
It’s something else you have to support with your plugin.
If it were me, I would not have it in. But if I were required to have it, I would place a disclaimer that this is separate from the exiting scene triggers.
So "Run" is basically the reset button of "Stop Next"?
We could say that...
Counter Intuitive: The days of the week are set to when you want bypass versus when you want active. It's very unnatural that way IMO. I thought it was broken until I inverted them.
I can do the reverse. It was just that the principle is that the device is triggered daily by default (but I could put all days as checked by default).
To see if the majority of users have that opinion...
you shouldn't have scenes triggering in the device
I understand your reasons. It's just I don't like the UI5 where you have to edit a scene to add a trigger. We could say that it's a temporary feature, waiting for a better official UI... I could add a disclaimer about this...
Write the plugin how you want it to behave and function. Do not let others discouraged your development. You are providing us an option we didn’t have and sharing it with us. Keep up the good work!
[quote=“garrettwp, post:13, topic:173004”]Write the plugin how you want it to behave and function. Do not let others discouraged your development. You are providing us an option we didn’t have and sharing it with us. Keep up the good work!
@futzle: I chuckle too. Yes, you can do all of this functionality with scenes, triggers, and virtual switches. But this clock/alarm sensor is very useful for scheduling and other purposes. Saves a lot of work and extra devices.
@Garret: He’s doing a great job with this plug in. But as we all know, as plugin devs we are kind of on an island by ourselves coding for a city of users. If you make something for yourself, then why publish it? If you don’t want feedback then why post here? It’s important to leverage this community as if it was your QA/design team helping you iron out the kinks. I had to raise the scene trigger issue because I know from experience with other systems this type of feature can be problematic. And to futzle’s point, keep things simple. The simpler and more focused the task, the easier to fix and perfect.
@Futzle: may not really need a plug in for this if your combo switch had a “time range” option.
The current implementation for scene scheduling is cumbersome. Wish I could have time of day, day of week and day of year options.
[quote=“electricessence, post:17, topic:173004”]@Futzle: may not really need a plug in for this if your combo switch had a “time range” option.
The current implementation for scene scheduling is cumbersome. Wish I could have time of day, day of week and day of year options.[/quote]
I think the “range time” option for some reason is not supported by Vera?
Thats why it is not in the plugin…
[quote=“electricessence, post:15, topic:173004”]@futzle: I chuckle too. Yes, you can do all of this functionality with scenes, triggers, and virtual switches. But this clock/alarm sensor is very useful for scheduling and other purposes. Saves a lot of work and extra devices.
@Garret: He’s doing a great job with this plug in. But as we all know, as plugin devs we are kind of on an island by ourselves coding for a city of users. If you make something for yourself, then why publish it? If you don’t want feedback then why post here? It’s important to leverage this community as if it was your QA/design team helping you iron out the kinks. I had to raise the scene trigger issue because I know from experience with other systems this type of feature can be problematic. And to futzle’s point, keep things simple. The simpler and more focused the task, the easier to fix and perfect.[/quote]
Please enlighten us why the scene trigger is a bad idea. You say something is bad, but provide no explanation why. If your explanation holds water, it could be valuable to other developers.
If I was to give a primary reason I would say because of the potential for issues. Imagine you’re designing a car. In this case it’s analogous to putting a button within reach of the passenger that’s labeled “accelerate”.
Vera already has a mechanism for triggers. Placing a redundant feature in parallel with the current implementation creates a point of conflict that doesn’t exist without it.
Now, if that UI was simply a shortcut that added/removed a trigger from that scene then that’s great! Then it’s just a shortcut using the existing implementation and makes life easier. But this is not that.
