Newbie questions: sunrise/sunset and Activity conditions

I’m just starting to look at reactor, and it looks like it could help with a couple of small pain points I have with my current scene setup. I do have a couple of questions, however:

  1. Will the sunrise/sunset condition properly handle out-of-order sunrise/sunset, that is the days where, in a given midnight-midnight period, the sun sets before it rises? For example, the days when the sun sets at 12:45am, and rises at 3:30am. I’ve had issues with this using the built-in day/night tools, causing my outside lights to be on in the middle of the day.

  2. Is it possible to have conditions in the Activities? I would like to make a setup like the following:

  • Condition: certain light turned on OR motion detected on certain sensor, but only between x and y time on weekends, and a different time range on weekdays
  • Activity: turn on outlet a (always), set certain light to 50% ONLY IF said light is currently off (i.e. if the light is already on, don’t change it)

Since the condition will change from tripped to not tripped multiple times (due to motion being detected or not), the Activity will run multiple times. I don’t want to re-set the light to 50% each time, especially if I have manually changed the brightness - only if the light is off, it should be turned on. Is this possible? One workaround I have thought of would be to create a virtual switch that is turned on when the sensor runs, and is turned off after the scheduled time for the sensor, with that switch being off being one of the conditions to run the activity, but I’m wondering if there might be a less convoluted option.

Wow! Where do you live!?
Anyway I think it will, You can have before, after or between…

You can’t (I think) put conditions into the activities per se, so you’d probably need to get your logic right but nothing you’ve said there seems over hard.

You can have the state of the light as one of the logical conditions. You might need two sets of conditions. One to turn on the outlet and one to determine what to do with the light.

Make sense?

C

Fairbanks, AK. Just a little south of the Arctic circle :smiley:, so yeah, I’ve had issues with day/night code on vera making false assumptions and getting it wrong during the summer. In theory, I would think “between” should work properly, but wanted to confirm.

Actually, now that I think about the logic more, I’m thinking it can be as simple as don’t do anything if the light is on. So ((bath light OR motion) AND (not living room light))=turn on plug and living room light. Add in the time limits, and that should work well for that. I think I was still thinking along the limits of the built-in scene editor, rather than just starting from scratch with the logic and building it up properly :stuck_out_tongue:

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From memory you can do between 15 minutes before sunrise and 15 minutes after sunset, for example. It would be difficult to get that confused I’d have thought ;). But you’d need to check.

I don’t envy you at this time of year :wink:

C

Yeah, you would think that would be difficult to get confused, but vara managed it. My guess is that what was going on is that the vera day/night logic made the assumption that sunset comes after sunrise (for any given midnight-midnight period), so if it was “after sunset” on a given day, that means it must be night!

Using the concept of “between”, however, which reactor provides, it should be more straight forward, as it should just compare the sunset time with the next sunrise time.

It’s this time of year when I wish I could work from sun up to sun down :stuck_out_tongue: Of course that schedule would get tiring during the summer…

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For what it’s worth, this is the logic tree I came up with. I think it fits all my requirements, and should only trigger at the proper times/days, if the (ok, dining room, not living room) light is off. In theory, if that light is on, this has already triggered, so the plug should be on as well. If I find that not happening, I think I could just add another group that doesn’t include the light state and trigger the plug off that group, but we’ll see if that’s needed or not. Thanks for the feedback!

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No worries. I am by no means an expert but hopefully was able to give some pointers

C