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mbonaccors
Starting Member
USA
7 Posts |
 Posted - 04/03/2012 : 2:18:14 PM
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Here's a trick that I've found works great for creating "nested-events". One limitation I found frustrating with Houselinc is that there wasn't a way for the software to understand which scenes had already been triggered when writing new events.
An example of what I mean:
You've created two scenes that activate via a Harmony Remote (Activity Watch TV vs. Watch Blue Ray):
-Watching TV (Dim the living room lights, medium lighting in kitchen etc.)
-Watching a Blu-Ray (Turn off living room lights, dim lighting in kitchen)
When Watching TV scene is active, you'd like the lights to ramp up to a certain brightness value when you walk into the kitchen for a snack (Using a motionlinc in kitchen), wait 1 minute and then re-activate the "Watching TV Scene"
When watching a Blu-Ray scene is active, you'd like the lights in the kitchen to ramp up to a certain brightness value, wait 1 minute, but then re-activate the "Watching Blu-Ray" scene.
To accomplish, I realized you could set conditional actions based on the specific brightness level of any dimmer in your setup. Since every dimmer has 100 brightness levels, if you set all of your scenes to unique combinations of brightness, you can get Houselinc to create conditional events based on which scenes are currently active.
Even if you have two additional scenes, you can simply modify the lighting brightness by 1-2% to help Houselinc differentiate between the two. This discovery has really expanded the intelligence of my setup.
Here are a few more examples of these types of events I've written for my setup:
"Arming" My Apartment When I Leave
I have events that I'd like to run only when Houselinc knows I'm out of the apt (vs. in the apt with all the lights off). When I leave my apt, I press the "Away" button on my keypadlinc. Houselinc turns all my lights off, but leaves 1 of the lights in my setup at 1% brightness. Every Event that I've written for when I'm away from the apt has a conditional in it that the secondary bedroom lamp (picked this at random) is at 1% brightness.
Apartment Motion Events
I like having rooms brighten when I enter them, then dim back down when motion times out. By utilizing the conditional field again and activating / checking for specific light-level values on certain dimmers. Houselinc is able to automatically dim up, and dim back down rooms more intelligently by understanding what other scenes are active at that time.
**VERY IMPORTANT NOTE**
1. If you have more than one action in your event, it's a better idea to use a dimmer outside of your scene as the conditional device. This is because if you are simply having Houselinc check the brightness levels of devices in the scene you want to modify, as soon as an action that will modify the scene begins it will break the conditional. Houselinc then stopps the event and the remaining actions won't be executed. What I usually do is set some random lamp in another room for 1% while the motion detection and dimming actions take place, then have the last action of the event put the random lamp back to 0%.
You could also purchase an additional dimmer, not connected to any load to act as the conditional dummy device.
I tried to explain this as clearly as I could, but feel free to reply with any questions, happy to get in contact with you directly if you would like more info!
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Houselinc trick for creating nested events
