boekweg wrote:what i found out is that if you have a door sensor you first had to define it as a "monitored device" with the right id (seen in your event log from the sensor) in the device section of indigo.
Then you have to determine what you want to do with this signal. I have made a trigger which determines the status of my door i.e. open or close. This variable is used for multiple purposes again.
You can do that... But the Monitored Device group also can eliminate the need for the trigger....
There is two ways to use an "automatic" trigger that switchboard manages.
1) Timed Device Profiles. This is an optional device in the plugin, but is quite powerful... When a Monitored Device group is triggered, one option is for a "Timed Activation Device" to be triggered. For example, in my configuration, my Timed Activation Device is an X10 Chime that will alert us when an exterior door is opened. You can set how long the device is left on, along with preventing the timed device from activating if it has been triggered within the last X minutes... This allows you to configure the device once, and use it within multiple Monitored Device Groups. (Or you can configure multiple variants, and use them as needed....)
2) Action Group Support - Each Monitored Device Group has an option "Turn On Action Group Support". When turned on, type in the name of an Action Group
(See below), and it will be triggered when a monitored device is triggered....
In many cases, this can replace the need for a Indigo trigger.
Now, I've simplified it. This action group support is slightly more complex, due to the naming of the action group. Let's say you have a Door sensor. It has two different states, Open, and Closed. The action group in my example will be "Exterior Doors".
When an Open state is detected, the action group that is triggered will be called "Exterior Doors_Open", and if a closed state is detected it would be "Exterior Doors_Closed".
This works with Keyfobs, for example, "Exterior Doors_Panic" for the panic signal from the key fobs.
Now, switchboard is smart enough to not to trigger an action group that doesn't exist. So if you only wanted an action to occur on opening the door, just create the *_Open action group.
Switchboard supports the following states with the Action group feature:
* Open
* Closed
* Armed
* Disarm
* Panic
* LightsOn
* LightsOff
Why not use Indigo Triggers? Go right ahead....
The main concern I had was the upkeep of those triggers. In my exterior door case, I have three exterior doors... If I wanted an action to occur on the opening of those doors, I would need to create 3 Indigo triggers. For switchboard, it's simple a checkbox, and the name of the action group. Even more so, if I included closed actions, which would increase it to 6 Indigo triggers....
And if you wanted to make any changes to those triggers, it would then be 3 or 6 triggers to update... Unless you were simply calling an Action group from the trigger... (And if so, then why not skip the middleman?)
The major advantage that Indigo Triggers currently have is that you can place conditions on the trigger, for example, Now, one thing Switchboard doesn't support is conditional Action Groups, for example, only trigger the action group at night...
That's something that might be worthwhile for certain conditions (i.e. Night Only, Daylight Only, Armed, Disarmed, Panic, ???) but that would be a future enhancement. If there is demand, I will certainly consider moving that up in the schedule...
- Benjamin