What's the correct way to set up a lamp on off scene?

Developer's Corner General Dev Discussions
1

I just received a couple of lamp controllers and paired them into my vera system. I created a scene called “lamp on” and told it to turn 2 different lamps on at sunset. I then created a different scene called lamp off at told it to turn off both lamps at 11pm.

Is this the correct way to do this with Vera? At first I was thinking that I should use a delayed action, but that only allows me to set how many hours to wait. With sunset time changing that would not allow me to do a delayed event (unless I wanted the lamps going off x hours past sunset which would always be changing), so I created the 2nd scene. Is my thinking correct on this?

Thanks,

Roveer

2

The two distinct scenes are the best solution in this scenario.

Using delays is effective as well, as it basically creates another job that will trigger at the prescribed time; however, if during the period between the first trigger and the prescribed delay your Vera restarts, the second job will be lost and never executed until the scene is fired again and the delay is not interrupted…

You really do not want long delays as part of a scene but they will work but do not plan for them if they will overlap a heal as that will interject a luup restart which as stated will kill the queued second job.

3

That’s a good first step.

Many continue to add to this scenario …

  1. Only turn on the lights when I am home
    Where home can be determined by: GeoFence, Wifi Address Of Mobile Phone Present, motion detectors …

  2. If I am not home I may want to randomize the when Lights go on/off.

As you do … you will find that you may need to look into:
Using LUA to add code to help control your scenes.
OR
Using the PLEG plugin to add lots of logic, timing, and ordering control to your Automation.

4

Thanks so much for the helpful tips. This is just the kind of information I was looking. First, validation that what I did wasn’t totally wrong, 2nd giving me a hint of advanced features and other considerations. This gives me a glimpse into what the vera system is capable of and as I become more proficient I’ll know what’s available.

Again, My thanks for such great replies.

Roveer