State Machine

Well, I guess I now have a rudimentary state machine. My original plan was to take an X10RF Slimline switch (one of the wireless switches I mentioned in an earlier post) and put that by the entrance from the garage so that we could press it whenever we came or went. Well, it turns out the wireless reception was not good from ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE HOUSE, so that didn't turn out too well. Fortunately, the next room off the laundry room (where the garage entrance is) is the breakfast room, and right there, 4 feet away from the garage entrance is one of the 8-button controllers I had installed months ago. And it had 3 unused buttons... wait for it... wait for it... Eureka!

I reprogrammed two of the buttons to just send links (received only by the software, not any other switches) to tell when my wife and I were home. I set them up as multibuttons (as is common in my house... one press for ON, two presses for OFF). As a confirmation, and this also fulfills my novelty wish of more voice announcements, the Audrey in the kitchen says hello and goodbye phrases appropriately when these links are activated. When both of us are out of the house, the lights turn off automatically, although my wife complained about a 15 second delay in that this morning. I set up the event in HomeSeer to be triggered by the condition that both of us were away using a condition trigger, but I don't know how often HomeSeer decides it wants to check if conditions are true (feel free to comment on this if you are one of the 4 people who read this blog and know the answer). Maybe it would be better to set up two events using device value changes (one for each of us) that checks if the other is home or not. I know those types of events are run immediately when the value changes.

As for the RF Slimline switches, I bought two with the initial thoughts that I would use one to turn on the kitchen lights from outside the bedroom (obviously, not well thought out since these are motion activated) and one by the garage. Now, looks like I'm not using either! Plus, the tactile feedback on these is minimal; although, I'm used to the audible click on the SAI UPB switches and controllers.

What is really holding me back at this point is my complete lack of VB or VB.NET scripting skills. I want to be able to have our alarms set automatically depending on who is home when the bedtime link is activated, but this is more than simple conditional logic and likely requires a script. I suppose I could use Perlscript (since that's what I know) as it is supported by HomeSeer, but that would put me in a HUGE minority as seemingly nobody elects to go this route. I'll probably try it anyways just to see what I can do. Plus, scripting would certainly clean up my events list as I have multiple events for many things that can be scripted. All in good time, I'm sure... Rome wasn't built in a day (but we can watch it in nice little hour snippets on HBO).