ISY / ELK Rules

TommyJames

New Member
Can you please give me examples or types of HA rules you have 'living' on the ELK vs ISY and vice versa.  I have read that ISY does time based really well and ELK does event based really well.  I am new and have not even purchased another products yet.
 
For example,
 
I would put the outside lights on the  ISY to come on around sunrise.
 
For the ELK, I would put if FIRE is detected turn on these lights in the house and turn off HVAC fans.
 
Any addtional thoughts would be welcome.
 
Thanks!!!
 
 
 
Since installing the optional elk module on the ISY, I have put all lighting rules on the ISY, no matter what.  I no longer even sync my lighting config to the Elk.  As far as the Elk is concerned there is no lighting control.   The ISY logic is a little more complex than the Elk, but I like having everything in one place to prevent side effects and to facilitate troubleshooting.
 
Most of my logic resides on the ISY, with exception of time-based events.

For example, I have a series is scenes that are based on a timeframe, I. E. Pre-wake, wake...
On the elk, I use custom settings to set the time I want to fire them, and matching rules that fire based on the custom settings. Since the custom settings can be changed from the keypad, or from Perl scripts I have running via cron on a pogoplug running debian, I have a very easy way to have flexible schedules. Since the isy doesn't yet support time variables, this was the most flexible option.
 
There are likely ways to handle this on the ISY that are beyond my expertise, but I find the Elk does a better job with changes in state, such as a door opening rather than the door being open. So for those types of scenarios I tend to use RP and Elk Rules.

I have the two connected via the Elk module on ISY and am very happy with the combo, and don't particularly care where the rule resides except that I can access the ISY from my Mac, which is handy.
 
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