I would like to get notified, per day, of a counter total. Background.
I have a condensing gas boiler and I measure the amount of water released by it using a tipping bucket water meter (actually a hacked rain gauge). As the bucket swings back and forth, it activates a reed switch which pulses a cheap digital counter. Once calibrated, a known count will equal a gallon. So I thought that maybe I could use the Vera Plus, so I have been playing around with scenes using both PLEG and Reactor.
I have a PLEG device and trigger it with a Virtual Binary Switch(for testing) and in the PLEG device you can set a counter to increment each time it is triggered. The counter’s name is x1 and I can see it increments correctly.
I also have a Reactor device and have been trying to figure out how to retrieve the counter amount from the PLEG device. I have had success using the expressions tab and have retrieved TargetLevels from other devices, but can’t see how to get the counter amount.
If I am able to to get the counter amount, the next step would be to notify (email?) me. Can Notifications even do that?
I have no idea where PLEG stores its counters, so I’m afraid I can’t be of help there.
A ReactorSensor has its own trip counter that you can access, though. You need to make a ReactorSensor that trips (root group goes true) when the bucket tips (based on your description), and that should be as simple as a single condition to test the switch contact.
Since it sounds like you’re just getting started with Reactor, the easiest thing to do is create a second ReactorSensor to watch the counter of the first (stored in the TripCount variable of the first RS) and do whatever needs to be done when the counter gets high enough. Invoking a ResetRuntime action on the first ReactorSensor will reset the trip counter.
You can do it all in one ReactorSensor, but you have to structure the logic so that only the switch contact affects the tripped state of the overall device, and for newcomers, that can be a little tricky. If you get it working with two ReactorSensors, I can show you what needs to be done to combine them later.
Thank you very much. A couple of rainy days coming up so I can spend time with what you have given me, guilt free. I actually migrated away from PLEG to Reactor for all my scenes and ‘stuff’'.
If I may be so bold to ask, how does one get variables from Vera, to be outputed to email or txt.
Vera’s built-in notifications don’t support that, but if you use the “Notify” action in Reactor, you can put in a variable value in the message using the {} syntax (e.g. “The weather is expected to be {forecast} today”). Reactor’s Notify action supports SMTP and works with Gmail, etc.