lighting condition (random time)

[Anonymous]

#40215

I have setup a lighting condition as follows:

office status ff 0 delay
bar status ff 5 minute delay

Condition 1
AND sunset minus offset 10- minutes (only holiday checked)

Condition 2
AND random time start 12 minutes (only holiday checked)

These conditions fail to do anything to my lights.

I was hoping these conditions would start the office and bar lights routine… (condition 1) 10 minutes prior to sunset and (condition 2) have a random time of 12 minutes prior and subsequent to this time.

Is this the proper use of random time?

Thanks again for your help…Murray

[Anonymous]

#43152

When Conditions are Anded all the Anded “conditions” must exist for the Effect(s) to occur. Condition 1 is an event which occurs at 10 minutes before sunset which must also exist with Condition 2 which is a random event. It would be a rare situation where a random Condition 2 would exist at 10 minutes before sunset and if it happened would happen once per day, at 10 minutes before sunset.

[Anonymous]

#43153

Is it possible to have a condition which responds at a certain hour with a slight variation?

[Anonymous]

#43154

You can create an action that only fires if the trigger occurs during a certain time window by ANDing your trigger with a condition that uses the “Window” option with the “StartTime” set to the beginning of the window and the “Offset” set to the duration of the window. I have made this work with actions where the second condition is an Insteon device status change, but it should work with a random time condition as well. Unfortunately, you can’t use a time relative to sunrise/sunset for the start time, so you would have to create a fixed time window.

I think there may be a way to create a time window around sunset. I haven’t tried this solution, but based on my experience with how the 2.xx software keeps track of device status, you might want to try the following:

1) Create an X10 device with a device code you aren’t using. Call it something like “X10SunsetWindow”
2) Create an action that turns X10SunsetWindow on at Sunset -16 and another action that another that turns X10SunsetWindow off at Sunset -4 (this should create a 12 minute window around Sunset -10 where X10SunsetWindow is on)
3) Replace condition #1 in your original action with X10SunsetWindow device status ON (x02)

EDIT: As I thought about this more, I’m not certain it will work. When an X10 device status is the only condition, an action doesn’t keep firing (i.e. when the motion sensor signals ON, the action fires only once). So I’m not sure how the EZServe will see the X10SunsetWindow condition after the initial ON transition. I will try to play with this tonight if I have a minute.

[Anonymous]

#43155

I verified that the above concept…using a “dummy” X10 device to create a window for a random event to occur will work. I turned the dummy device on and off manually for testing, but it should also work with the device turned on and off through actions.

One comment – I had trouble making the random setting work for shorter time intervals. After trying several between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, I set it to 15 (as in Lee’s example). Only the last one worked.

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