ver0776
Active Member
I find that almost every room I have requires different logic. Some rooms like the bathrooms have very tight logic that works almost flawlessly. The other extremes like my main room, I don't not attempt to control lighting. The kitchen, because it does not have a door, for example, can not use the same logic as a bed room or bathroom, but the fridge, stove, dishwasher, lights and 2 motion detectors all update a single occupancy timer, so any activity helps keep the room occupied.
I would never tie anything to a motion off event. I have motion off completely filtered out. If you are in a bathroom and the door is closed, motion off is irrelevant as you simply could not have gotten out.... So my bathroom has a normal vacancy timer set to 1 minute. If you go in and close the door, the vacancy timer is adjusted to 25 minutes. If you don't trigger motion in 25 minutes, you are dead or tricked it and closed the door from the outside. Once the door opens again, the vacancy timer is set to expire in 1 minute again. 1 Minute seems short, but any activity resets it, so it works nice. My longest occupancy timer in the house is 4 minutes.
So with being able to use additional sensors, you can have much better logic. Let say you go into your living room, the timer to turn the lights off is engaged at 4 minutes, but if the TV is on, it is set to 40 minutes... when the TV goes off, it is changed to 4 minutes again... You should be able to change the timers according to many conditions.
Again, I am not sure if you can do any of this with Variables and timers in ELK... No one with an Elk has tryied my software so I don't know if they play together either, but pehaps you could use something outside of Elk to handle the occupancy logic and just tell the Elk when to turn stuff on and off, or let the Elk just monitor... My 0.0.5.3 release is pretty stable if you wanna try its occupancy system.
Sorry if OT, I love occupancy tracking though!!!!
Vaughn
I would never tie anything to a motion off event. I have motion off completely filtered out. If you are in a bathroom and the door is closed, motion off is irrelevant as you simply could not have gotten out.... So my bathroom has a normal vacancy timer set to 1 minute. If you go in and close the door, the vacancy timer is adjusted to 25 minutes. If you don't trigger motion in 25 minutes, you are dead or tricked it and closed the door from the outside. Once the door opens again, the vacancy timer is set to expire in 1 minute again. 1 Minute seems short, but any activity resets it, so it works nice. My longest occupancy timer in the house is 4 minutes.
So with being able to use additional sensors, you can have much better logic. Let say you go into your living room, the timer to turn the lights off is engaged at 4 minutes, but if the TV is on, it is set to 40 minutes... when the TV goes off, it is changed to 4 minutes again... You should be able to change the timers according to many conditions.
Again, I am not sure if you can do any of this with Variables and timers in ELK... No one with an Elk has tryied my software so I don't know if they play together either, but pehaps you could use something outside of Elk to handle the occupancy logic and just tell the Elk when to turn stuff on and off, or let the Elk just monitor... My 0.0.5.3 release is pretty stable if you wanna try its occupancy system.
Sorry if OT, I love occupancy tracking though!!!!
Vaughn