Pause and resume

Plugins & Plugin Development Reactor
#1

I use a pump to irrigate my garden and send the water to different areas by the use of valves. All this is powered from solar panels.

My problem is clouds reduce the solar energy and I end up drawing energy from the grid.
Is there a way of pausing the reactor when solar energy falls and the resuming it where it left off when the sun comes out again?
Thank you for a truly outstanding plugin.

#3

There are several ways to do this. An obvious (hopefully) way is to incorporate that sensitivity into your logic, so that your logic isn’t triggered/activities run when the weather criteria are not met (solor energy below threshold).

Another way is to use a separate group to enable/disable your irrigation control group. You can enable/disable a group within a sensor by using a Device Action activity on the ReactorSensor itself, and choosing the SetGroupEnabled action to either enable or disable the irrigation condition group as appropriate.

The former is probably more desirable, as doing the latter opens the possibility that clouds could move in while irrigation is running, so it’s possible to disable the irrigation group while it’s active and thus it can’t shut it off until the cloud cover clears and the group is re-enabled. A simple solution is to make sure that the activity that disables the irrigation group also ensures that the irrigation is forced off.

1 Like
#4

Thanks for the speedy reply.
I did think of solution A, but my concern was whether the reactor would continue where it left off and not start at the very beginning.
I did an experiment and it did seem to me that it would start at the beginning, whereas I need it to continue from where it was paused.

#5

It’s hard for me to understand what you mean by this, because any notion of “beginning” and “continu[ing] where it left off” would be a function of your logic, not Reactor itself inherently. Reactor also doesn’t really “pause”. You haven’t really explained your problem or your logic in any depth, or posted a Logic Summary, so there’s no way for me to help you more with what is known so far. This feels like an X-Y Problem at the moment.

#6

I imagine that @glenndower when, lets say, the solar energy falls under a limit after, lets say, 20 min out of 30 he wants the irrigation to stop. When the solar energy goes above the limit he wants the irrigation to start and continue for 10 min. It could be handled by a variable when irregation starts and then calculate when it stops and the remaining minutes. Perhaps @glenndower can give us more info if this is correct.

#7

Sure, I get that. This can all be done in the logic, without any trickery or external control. The logic has to be written carefully (as is often the case). But with what we’ve been given so far, we know nothing about his approach to the problem, so we can’t guide him. We also don’t even know if his question is on the path to a workable solution, which is the X-Y part of my previous comment. If we’re going to help, we need more than this.

#8

Thanks for the replies.
This is what I have so far;-

Pump On
Open Valve A
Delay
Close Valve A
Open Valve B
Delay
Close Valve B
Open Valve C
etc
Pump Off

My concern is if the Solar Energy were to drop during one of the delays it may continue to be below the threshold into the next delay period and miss the valve changeover.
I need the process to pause when the solar output is below a set threshold and when it rises for it to continue from where it was paused.

#9

You can stop an activity, but you cannot pause and resume it. You need to approach your logic another way.

#10