A common requirement of any HA system is to automatically turn on/off devices at a certain time of day: this is where Indigo's Schedules (formerly Time/Date Actions in Indigo 4 and before) come into play. Using Schedules, it's possible to turn on/off lights, coffee makers, etc. at specific times during the day. You can even introduce some randomness to them so that it will make your house look more “lived in”. This How-to level of difficulty is Simple.
Before you start creating your Schedule, you should understand some basics about Schedules:
In this scenario, we want to turn on the coffee pot at a fixed time each weekday morning. Just follow these steps to create the action:
SCHEDULES
in the outline view on the left side of the screen (or a folder under SCHEDULES
if you prefer)New…
button above the td action list to create a new td actionCreate New Schedule
dialog that appears, give your action a name: for instance “Turn on coffee pot”Schedule
is highlighted (if not, click on it)Time:
section, specify the time of day you want the action to happen. For this example, let's make it fixed at 7:00am, so you'll select the first radio button and set the value of that control to 7:00am. If you were controlling a light, and you wanted it to look more lived in, you might specify a value in the Randomize by +- XX minutes
- this would take the fixed time specified (7:00am), and, on a daily basis, randomly add or subtract some number of minutes. There are also convenient selections for sunrise and sunset.Date:
section, specify the date(s) that you want the action to happen. For this example, let's say that you only want it to happen during weekdays (not the weekend) - select the radio button next to Days of week
, and click M, Tu, W, Th, F. By selecting this option, it's an implicit repetition - that is, it's gonna happen EVERY Monday, Tuesday, etc. Conditions
tab because we always want this trigger to fire (you can use conditions to customize whether this trigger will fire or not)Actions
tabControl Light / Appliance
from the Type:
popup (we want to turn OFF the device after some amount of time)Turn On
on the Action:
popupAuto-off after XX minutes
, and set the value in the text box. This will automatically turn off the coffee pot after some time so you don't end up with a crispy coffee pot!OK
at the bottom of the dialog.
That's it! Now, every weekday morning the coffee pot will turn on at 7:00am and you'll awake to the smell of fresh brewed coffee(assuming you remember to set it up the night before!). You can see the Schedule fire in the Event Log window, and in the Schedule list you'll see when the next trigger of this action will occur. Congratulations!
Check out the How-To for motion sensors to see how the Condition
tab is used.