GCal3 Help

I am pretty much a vera newbie. I have a vera 3 and just installed the GCal 3 calendar plugin. I have gotten everything to work pretty much but what I am having trouble with is setting up a scene. I have an outside fountain that I want to run for a certain amount of hours a day. I can only get GCal 3 to work to trigger on any event. Can’t get it to work setting a key word. What I want to do is start at lets say 8 AM and run until 6 PM. I thought setting a calendar would work that. I setup an event that says “fountain on”. Again only works for me on any event. At the end of the event how do I trigger it to shutoff? Any help would be great.

All scene related activity in Vera is an ‘on’ trigger with no ‘off’ trigger. That is to say, you can tell a scene to start but you cannot tell a scene to stop - instead you need to run another scene that does the ‘off’ part.

In your case, I’d set up two scenes:
one that turns your fountain on
a second that turns your fountain off

Using GCal3 you can accomplish this in two ways:

  1. Setting a Keyword and triggering the first scene with Event Matches Keyword:Tripped and the second with Event Matches Keyword:Not Tripped
  2. Setting up two calendar events (they only need to be > 1 minute long) : ‘fountain on’ (starting at the on time) and ‘fountain off’ (starting at the off time)
    and use Event has a specified name : FOUNTAIN ON to trigger the first scene and Event has a specified name : FOUNTAIN OFF to trigger the second scene. (Note capitalization of the event name)

The first approach has the benefit of only needing a single event in the calendar but then you can only use that plugin instance for events that match that keyword.
The second requires two events but allows you to use the same plugin instance for other events as well.

I’d suggest the second approach as it gives more flexibility.

This should get you going.

Thanks Stuart I will try that again but it failed to work for me the first time. I am wondering if it is because I didn’t capitalize but it may be I just do not know what I am doing. When you say use the event has a specified name you mean I should name the event in google calendar “Fountain On”?

When you set up a trigger for your scene: GCal3 offers 3 possibilities:

  1. Event Matches Keyword – with options to trigger on “Tripped” or “Not Tripped”
  2. Event has a specified name – you specify the event name, in caps (you do not have to name the event in the calendar in caps but GCAL3 changes it internally to all caps) – you would not set a keyword to use this option
  3. Event Start or End – follows the rules you set for ‘eligible events’ and triggers on the event start and end – mainly for notifications and similar use as you need some LUA code to tell if it’s the start or end of an event.

Take a look at the documentation in the very first post for detailed explaination

Thanks Stuart. I have it working now.